Maybe it’s actually a good idea for intelligent people to be curious about Russian ideas, design and history. Especially now. Seems like a treating the curiosity as “bad taste” could lead to unhealthy deliberate ignorance.

I think it’s a fair question. Russia has put much of the world on edge right now, and has turned life into a waking nightmare for millions of Ukrainians. I could see how this romanticization of Soviet tech could be upsetting to some people.

On the other hand, I think it’s healthy to take a step back and remember that even in dark times and people that you may hate, there are positive qualities. And even things like this that can be strangely beautiful.

I dunno, I come from an era where at the moment we were destroying Afghanistan, or Iraq, the BBC would be publishing articles about the various missiles we were using, marvelling at their technological sophistication. In one article it was said that "we mustn't forget that, above all, this is a JDAM war." Which is strange, cos I felt that, above all, it was a criminal and savage war of aggression with a tremendous human cost.

I guess we don't all have the same sort of humanitarian feelings. Or a lot of us can quite easily put them aside. Which is fair enough, it is stressful to think about that after all.

In the middle of all that is going on in bad taste right now (eg. Condoleeza Rice doing an overnight 180 and deciding wars of aggression are bad), this seems to hardly even register.

Current events are, arguably, a refutation of soviet ideals (for all that they were often broken) and even practice - Putin explicitly talks in points related to Tsarist Imperial Russia, and a core argument of his invasion is that Ukrainians aren't a separate nation with separate language, and Ukraine "isn't a real country".

Things that, for all the oppression, were accepted and obvious part of USSR - there was Ukrainian SSR, not Ukraine as region of Greater Russia. Even with effective forcing of Russian language for all technical uses, even Stalin at his worst dealt with USSR as union of many nations, even if some artificially created from displaced people (in order to create single-nation autonomous regions).

Honestly it's too bad that Putin's obsession with the Soviet era isn't at all focused on the things that were good about the Soviet Union.

Things like this, or its space program. Instead, it's all the bad parts (territorial conquest) with none of the good.

I'm guessing this was posted because of the video of the Ukrainians asking the Russians to stop shelling the plant... ;(

It looked exactly like this.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's not the control rooms' fault that Putin is a warmonger.