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> 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 e
by ch4s3 4y ago
> 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.
- p_l 4y agoThen 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).
- ch4s3 4y agoI'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.
- orbital-decay 4y agoI 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.
- ch4s3 4y agoIt’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.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoHere’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_smuggling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_computing_technology_...
- ch4s3 4y agoYou'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.