5 ms·

Maybe not in a traditional sense, but they did have a pretty robust black market

Bartweiss 10y ago
And as I hear the stories, this did happen. Cars are tough because you can't do a mechanic's job without tools and some obvious space, but there are at least stories of people getting cars and parting them out at a profit. (Similarly, there are stories of tank "repair" in WWII happening by taking finished tanks meant for service and stripping them for parts to repair multiple other tanks.)
- M_Grey 10y ago
  One of my favorite anecdotes is from an old episode of Car Talk. A woman called in to ask if the following was ok (I'm paraphrasing from memory): "So my neighbor, who's from a former Soviet Bloc country is a great guy who helps me out when my car breaks down. One time my battery is dead, so he offers to jump start my car. While I look on baffled, then shocked, he unscrews his car's battery from the mounting, then flips it over and presses the contacts directly to my car's battery. It started though! So is that safe?" To further paraphrase the guys' responses... "Oh god no!!!" They further went on to point out though, that at some point when your life is dangerous and hard as a kind of background state, the little things stop even grabbing your notice. The degree of black marketeering in the USSR was just... staggering. Systemic. Understood to be "how the system works". Sometimes though you get tragedies like Vladimir Komarov. The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship." http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/co...
  - MegaButts 10y ago
    I recently watched a documentary about the space race, which mostly focused on von Braun and Korolev. As I was watching it, it seemed like the Soviets had a huge advantage of secrecy. The Americans never knew what they were doing. But perhaps the constant media attention for the US held them accountable. Going further off-topic, the fact that Korolev died because he spent years in a work camp due to the dumbest of political spitefulness is just depressing. From what I can tell, Korolev could have single-handedly won the space race for the Soviet Union - too bad they killed him.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      One may wonder that one should be worried that the more the media profess their political independence, the less likely it is to be true.
      - MegaButts 10y ago
        I honestly don't know what you're trying to say.
    - chadgeidel 10y ago
      Could be a "retcon" but I always heard we (the US) opened up the media on our space program as a sort of "marketing program" to show how awesome we were (on the world stage generally and specifically to the Soviets).
      - Bartweiss 10y ago
        I'm pretty confident there's some truth to this. The core reasons may have had less to do with marketing than practicality, but at a minimum the government saw an opportunity and grabbed hold. As for the lack of initial secrecy, that may have just been a practical consequence of why we won. NASA and JPL opened subcomponent development to private industry. At least in propellant development, this meant both research contracts and a general understanding that someone coming up with particularly good products could expect a massive government payout. It produced great results and even got private investors to foot a large research bill. It also had the consequence that the work was rather less secret than it might have been - especially the failures, which were generally shopped around to other buyers if they had any interesting properties. But it worked out pretty well overall: even with Russia getting info about US efforts, the rate of new research was still impressive enough to be thoroughly competitive. Anyone looking for an internal account of the (propellant) story might enjoy Ignition. It's free here, though Chrome can't handle the pdf: https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...
- digi_owl 10y ago
  More and more i find myself thinking back to a claim that Lenin asked Marx about the latters thoughts about turning Russia communist, and Marx scoffing at the idea. This because Marx envisioned the transition happening after capitalism hit a crisis, where upon the workers would take over and continue to operate the factories within the existing supply network (more coops, less central planning). In the USSR however it seemed one got more akin to the old Ford factory, where raw iron and coal came in at one end, and finished Model Ts rolled out the other. Thus there were no independent sub-suppliers of parts, everything was made internally as needed, and nothing more.
  - burntrelish1273 10y ago
    For some reason, at first, I thought it was a comedy bit.
  - smacktoward 10y ago
    Yes, this was one of the places where Lenin diverged from classical Marxist thought. Marx argued that society would slowly and naturally evolve towards socialism as workers gained experience and "class consciousness" from struggling with their capitalist bosses. Lenin argued that the slow evolution Marx had predicted was not actually happening, so a "vanguard party" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism) of highly committed activists and intellectuals was needed to drag the workers into the socialist future they stubbornly refused to realize they wanted. In retrospect this can be seen as a turning point in the process by which communism, a philosophy devoted to letting the masses rule themselves, turned into Soviet communism, a system in which the masses were bossed by party elites as hard or harder as they had been by the old czars and capitalists.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Ah yes, vanguards. Worked so wonderfully in France, Russia, and Egypt. Yep, that's sarcasm if you can't tell. What i am referring to in each instance is the French revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and the various fundamentalist groups around the middle east that follow some interpretation of Sayyid Qutb's philosophy.

And as I hear the stories, this did happen. Cars are tough because you can't do a mechanic's job without tools and some obvious space, but there are at least stories of people getting cars and parting them out at a profit. (Similarly, there are stories of tank "repair" in WWII happening by taking finished tanks meant for service and stripping them for parts to repair multiple other tanks.)

M_Grey 10y ago
One of my favorite anecdotes is from an old episode of Car Talk. A woman called in to ask if the following was ok (I'm paraphrasing from memory): "So my neighbor, who's from a former Soviet Bloc country is a great guy who helps me out when my car breaks down. One time my battery is dead, so he offers to jump start my car. While I look on baffled, then shocked, he unscrews his car's battery from the mounting, then flips it over and presses the contacts directly to my car's battery. It started though! So is that safe?" To further paraphrase the guys' responses... "Oh god no!!!" They further went on to point out though, that at some point when your life is dangerous and hard as a kind of background state, the little things stop even grabbing your notice. The degree of black marketeering in the USSR was just... staggering. Systemic. Understood to be "how the system works". Sometimes though you get tragedies like Vladimir Komarov. The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship." http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/co...
- MegaButts 10y ago
  I recently watched a documentary about the space race, which mostly focused on von Braun and Korolev. As I was watching it, it seemed like the Soviets had a huge advantage of secrecy. The Americans never knew what they were doing. But perhaps the constant media attention for the US held them accountable. Going further off-topic, the fact that Korolev died because he spent years in a work camp due to the dumbest of political spitefulness is just depressing. From what I can tell, Korolev could have single-handedly won the space race for the Soviet Union - too bad they killed him.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    One may wonder that one should be worried that the more the media profess their political independence, the less likely it is to be true.
    - MegaButts 10y ago
      I honestly don't know what you're trying to say.
  - chadgeidel 10y ago
    Could be a "retcon" but I always heard we (the US) opened up the media on our space program as a sort of "marketing program" to show how awesome we were (on the world stage generally and specifically to the Soviets).
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      I'm pretty confident there's some truth to this. The core reasons may have had less to do with marketing than practicality, but at a minimum the government saw an opportunity and grabbed hold. As for the lack of initial secrecy, that may have just been a practical consequence of why we won. NASA and JPL opened subcomponent development to private industry. At least in propellant development, this meant both research contracts and a general understanding that someone coming up with particularly good products could expect a massive government payout. It produced great results and even got private investors to foot a large research bill. It also had the consequence that the work was rather less secret than it might have been - especially the failures, which were generally shopped around to other buyers if they had any interesting properties. But it worked out pretty well overall: even with Russia getting info about US efforts, the rate of new research was still impressive enough to be thoroughly competitive. Anyone looking for an internal account of the (propellant) story might enjoy Ignition. It's free here, though Chrome can't handle the pdf: https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...
digi_owl 10y ago
More and more i find myself thinking back to a claim that Lenin asked Marx about the latters thoughts about turning Russia communist, and Marx scoffing at the idea. This because Marx envisioned the transition happening after capitalism hit a crisis, where upon the workers would take over and continue to operate the factories within the existing supply network (more coops, less central planning). In the USSR however it seemed one got more akin to the old Ford factory, where raw iron and coal came in at one end, and finished Model Ts rolled out the other. Thus there were no independent sub-suppliers of parts, everything was made internally as needed, and nothing more.
- burntrelish1273 10y ago
  For some reason, at first, I thought it was a comedy bit.
- smacktoward 10y ago
  Yes, this was one of the places where Lenin diverged from classical Marxist thought. Marx argued that society would slowly and naturally evolve towards socialism as workers gained experience and "class consciousness" from struggling with their capitalist bosses. Lenin argued that the slow evolution Marx had predicted was not actually happening, so a "vanguard party" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism) of highly committed activists and intellectuals was needed to drag the workers into the socialist future they stubbornly refused to realize they wanted. In retrospect this can be seen as a turning point in the process by which communism, a philosophy devoted to letting the masses rule themselves, turned into Soviet communism, a system in which the masses were bossed by party elites as hard or harder as they had been by the old czars and capitalists.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Ah yes, vanguards. Worked so wonderfully in France, Russia, and Egypt. Yep, that's sarcasm if you can't tell. What i am referring to in each instance is the French revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and the various fundamentalist groups around the middle east that follow some interpretation of Sayyid Qutb's philosophy.