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The USSR went from being a feudal society to an industrial society with a significant lead over the US in a number of areas, including rocketry and space, withi

The USSR went from being a feudal society to an industrial society with a significant lead over the US in a number of areas, including rocketry and space, within a couple of generations. With a devastating world war in the middle. There's a lot to criticise about the Soviet system, just as there is any in totalitarian culture - but in science and engineering, "hammering everyone down to the bottom" is simply not what happened. You could make at least as strong a case for "hammering most people down to the bottom" in the US, because easy and affordable access to high quality education certainly isn't considered a public good, and plenty of talented people are excluded from it.

IgorPartola 5y ago
As someone born in the USSR, this is an oversimplified view instead. You can claim that the USSR had some good science and engineering, and it did, but it wasn’t always to benefit the people and was definitely done by oppressing the people. Remember that the USSR was the country that marched a platoon of soldiers under a mushroom cloud (without telling them of course) to see what would happen to them in the name of science. It’s also the country to displaced a village by rolling in tanks and telling people to move into houses of the people living in the next village over, immediately, and giving no reason. This was done to detonate an underground nuke to see if a natural gas fire could be put out. It’s the country that refused to evacuate Pripyat after the Chernobyl accident because it would have looked bad. The USSR wasn’t some benevolent scientific community bent on bettering lives. Its scientific interests were primarily military-related.