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Comment by yakshaving_jgt | Hacker News Reader

…Well, yes? Of course? How else do you explain a supposedly "technologically backward" society beating even the Americans in the space race?

I mean, even this very article immediately refutes that narrative.

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Ok, but you're talking 1950s, when this article is talking about the '70s and '80s.

The US got so far ahead of the USSR in computing because of the military-industrial-academic complex that channelled vast public resources and knowledge into projects that had both military/state ends as well as commercial ones too. Especially after the launch of Sputnik and the subsequent sense that the US was trailing the USSR in a 'cybernetics gap', which triggered a huge amount of funding in the US for technical developments. This is the story of how the personal, graphical, interactive and internetworked computer was invented.

In the USSR the military did its own thing without sharing its knowledge and inventions with the wider society, especially with such cutting edge inventions like computers. As such outside of the military (even this is debatable), the USSR as a whole did fall significantly behind the West in terms of technological progress. Who knows, if it hadn't it might still be around today.

See Slava Gerovitch and Benjamin Peter's writings, for example:

InterNyet: https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterN...

I'm not really refuting any of that, and I think your point is orthogonal to the one that I'm making. As far as I'm aware, Western sentiment with regards to technological capability in the USSR didn't radically shift in those two or three decades. In fact I believe popular sentiment remained fairly static all throughout the Cold War which encompasses the decades you named.

> How else do you explain a supposedly "technologically backward" society beating even the Americans in the space race?

Invest in a small elite and let the rest of the country starve. That's old as civilization.

That's very unfair. The education was free for all, there was significant investment in education, 90% of schools in my rather ancient city were built during Soviet time, not before, not after. Same for university campuses and hospitals. That systemic investment into education along with state-wide industrialisation eventually paid-off. There were wide-spread programs how for example factory worker can get a higher education while still being able to provide for his family.

Invest in a small elite and let the rest starve was more of a motto of Russian Empire, where most of people couldn't read, yet there were some technological achievements nevertheless.

I argue that the ways of the Russian Empire weren't that much different from the Soviet Union ways - both internally and with its vassal states.

"New boss... same as the old boss." as they say. This is true for most regime changes in history. Those in power change, and their motivated reasoning may change, but the net effects on those down the stack is pretty much the same.

Russian Empire was very different, like South Korea - North Korea different.

I would say that Russian Empire and USSR were similar in the methods of achieving their goals — a lot of rigid hierarchical structures, top-down management, a certain level of brutality. But the goals were very different.

I think you're mistranslating "conventional narrative" as "we think this is a rock-solid fact". It doesn't mean that.

I'm not sure why you think that. I certainly don't think "fact" has anything to do with this, as this is all about narrative.

What I'm taking issue with is that this narrative is being characterised as conventional, which means in accordance with what is generally done or believed. I think this is only generally done or believed in Western society, which I already alluded to.

The propagandist wants the opponent to be strong enough to be a threat but ideologically weak enough to defeat. That should be enough for anyone to pause and think hard about what's really going on.

Russian boots on the moon when?

Dude, are you literally trolling right now? The space race did not end the way you think it did.

And no, the article does not refute that "narrative" at all, if you're reading carefully. The 80s were the years of the microcomputing revolution in the West, by that time most of the computing products of the Eastern block were knockoffs of the western counterparts. They were objectively lagging behind at that point.

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