2 ms·
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 b
by p_l 4y ago
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).
- 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.