Hacker News Reader

Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

You’re missing my point. The Soviets sent basically all of their scientists and engineers to the front, the GULAG, or to a wall. They had NO way to jumpstart jumpstart science and engineering without espionage and captured scientists a it’s incredibly well documented that whole Soviet industries sprang out of NKVD activities.

View on HN

The point you seem to be missing is that even with all that, Soviets both had their own ideas, their own implementation of ideas and got ahead of the West in some of the areas. Yes, I'd agree that harsh societal environment greatly diminished the possible outcome - and also that lots of spying was being done by Soviets (to say nothing about the West).

> to the front, the GULAG, or to a wall

Right, but still, after Stalin's death, USSR had a renaissance of sorts - art, science, tech, quality of life improvements across the board. Still not enough to win the Cold War - was likely impossible - but enough to maintain for some time the lead in some areas and be not terribly outpaced in most others. Unfortunately, effects (and conditions) of Khrushchev Thaw could hardly be repeated, and until Gorbachev the country leadership wasn't allowing enough of progress.

One of the points of the article, I believe, is to remind that USSR had their own achievements.

I’m not missing that at all, they did some novel stuff like their work with phages. But the whole of their nuclear industry and several others were built on NKVD theft. And the all of it was fueled by grain stolen from Ukraine and mines and logging camps full of millions of slaves. The brutality in my opinion overshadows everything else.

> But the whole of their nuclear industry and several others were built on NKVD theft.

What do you mean? They didn't have world-class scientists? They didn't compete in thermonuclear weapon race, with test of their own design (Sloika)? They didn't built world first nuclear power plant for the grid in Obninsk? They didn't participate in particles research, e.g. with invention of Tokamak? Did they steal all of that? Or you're just saying that whatever they did, early on they used most important data from spying? Learning from others, and spying for your adversaries both predate USSR by millenniums.

> And the all of it was fueled by grain stolen from Ukraine

You mean, different part of the same country specialized in different activities? Which grain was stolen - and by whom - from Ukraine (you mean, Ukrainian SSR?) when nuclear research was going on, mostly after WWII?

> What do you mean? They didn't have world-class scientists?

The did in fact have some, of course it was a huge place, but the theft of nuclear secrets is well documented, as are other episodes of industrial tech. In fact the Mitrokhin Archives[1] revealed that industrial espionage was one of the primary purposes of Soviet spying. For example in 1971 Agent TONDA gave the KBG two volumes of documents on micro electronic components developed in Tokyo for US aerospace use.

> Which grain was stolen - and by whom - from Ukraine (you mean, Ukrainian SSR?)

I'm referring of course to The Holodomor[2] which was executed at gun point and overseen by Moscow via the NKVD. The whole thing was used by Stalin to clear our rebellious Ukrainians and to fund industrialization.

What I'm saying is that a lot of touted Soviet achievements were built on a foundation of theft, slavery, and ethnic cleansing unrivaled since WWII.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

So you're condemning USSR as a whole, not just in the scope of this discussion?

I replied above[1], to paraphrase yes. The USSR was founded and build on brutality, and sustained on brutality and repression long after Stalin was gone. If there is such a thing as evil, the government of the USSR was truly and deeply evil.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33269000

USSR had a lot of really, really bad sides. I just think we're talking about something different here. But overall I agree with you.

From down thread

> So you're condemning USSR as a whole, not just in the scope of this discussion?

Yes. I'm am 100% fully condemning the whole USSR for its full history. The purges, the Holodomor, forced relocations, anti-Jewish programs, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, all of it. The USSR condemned racism in the US while at the same time running an ethnic cleansing program across its whole land mass so massive and pitiless that it would have made an SS officer blush. They condemned colonialism and yet ran South Yemen as a colony until 1990. The evil didn't stop with Stalin, the repression just became a little more graceful.

And you're missing the part where majority of scientists and engineers in GULAG system had their camps be closed R&D and industrial facilities, with various levels of actual internment - considerable portion of it was simply part & parcel of relocation of industry to Siberia.

In fact major names that westerners might know went exactly through that system (Mikoyan and Guryevich actually had a period that was euphemistically referred as "fell out of favour for bad results on MiG-1 fighter"), and slowly relocated back to various locations in the timeframe between end of WW2 and Stalin's death.

And do you know what Mikoyan & Guryevich design bureau did while in GULAG? Spent years building high performance planes that were pushing what was possible for propeller planes, which ultimately got them ready to get back in the high-end fighter design as jet era started.

> where majority of scientists and engineers in GULAG system had their camps be closed R&D and industrial facilities

This is so hilariously untrue I’ve never even seen anyone make this claim before. Tens of thousands of engineers are known to have died digging canals with their bare hands.

Sure some folks like Mikoyan got lucky, but forcing scientists into slave labor is hardly an accomplishment to be proud of.

Then you read nearly nothing of the closed city system, which was also part of GULAG. Was there a lot of idiotic suffering involved and a lot of people killed by the system? Yes. It doesn't mean they had nothing left and had to spy for everything.

And the reason I mentioned the "euphemism" is that they got really lucky - other teams also went through the same system, but for example Yakovlev OKB wasn't censured, whereas MiG OKB probably avoided digging canals only because MiG-3 cleaned some of the bad reputation they got from MiG-1 and for a time both were the major planes for certain categories of air war available in USSR (high altitude intercepts).

I'm familiar with the closed city system, but to say the majority of scientists swept up in the purge ended up in this is laughable. But if you know about those, you have to know that the NKVD was dumping reams of stolen documents from the west on their desks and telling them to copy the designs.Hell the RBMK of Chernobyl fame was based on documents stolen concerning Chicago Pile-1.

That your defense is to say that many scientists in the middle of the century in the USSR were merely doing science in slave colonies is telling.

I don't think anybody's being proud here, the system was indeed repressive, unjust, and absurdly ineffective, and killed a lot of people; it doesn't need to be stated every time. You're very unlikely to find Soviet sympathizers on HN. What's happening is people with actual history knowledge rolling their eyes on some clearly overboard statements, especially about Soviets murdering all their engineers and scientists and stealing the nuclear power technology. Let's not get ridiculous.

It’s pretty clear if you’re familiar with anything available from the NKVD archives that industrial espionage was one of their key functions. There’s good documentation of this we’ll into the 1970s when it was the KGB of course.

It’s also well documented that tons of intellectuals and engineers(broadly speaking) got wrapped up in the Stalinist purges. Writing the charge of “wrecking” into law was a real thing. The deaths of untold numbers of wreckers on the White Sea Canal is no exaggeration. The tyrant of the quota system was very real.

The RBMK being based on Chicago-Pile-1 is well known. The way in which the USSR acquired the atomic bomb is also well documented.

I’d go on to say that any time this topic comes up, a number of Soviet apologists show up. There are actually some fairly prominent members of the community that are unapologetically Stalinists, not many but surprisingly some. It’s still worth rebutting IMHO.

Here’s another example of their theft: smuggling of IBM, DEC, and Intel systems, reverse engineering them, and making clones that worked with varying success/failure

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_computing_technology_...

You're exactly right, it's frustrating that there's a particular brand of technophilic tankie who loves to talk up Soviet computing and denies how much of it was based on stolen devices and schematics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com