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Makes you wonder if Russia's contributions to science back in the Soviet days were bigger than today under Putin's rule...

• marincounty 11y ago
  They need to get rid of the extortion, fraud, and payoffs. They need to get rid of Putin! As a kid, my father was harassing a Russian neighbor. He said if your country was so great--why do you your comrades want to buy Levi jeans, and they were getting $100 at the time used. He looked at my father, and said, 'Russian has its problems, but if went there today you couldn't find a homeless person.' My father didn't have anything left to say. (Actually, back then they were ignorantly called bums.)
  • briandear 11y ago
    "Ignorantly" called bums. The definition of "bum" is a vagrant; a perfectly accurate definition for many of the homeless. However, that being aside, "No homeless in the Soviet Union.." Hmm. I guess if you count being shipped to a brutal gulag in Siberia a "home," then yes. There were no homeless in the Soviet Union. If you failed to work in the Soviet Union, that was considered a crime against the state and thus you were sent to a camp. This would happen even if you didn't have a job nor could you get one. This "crime" was also common in East Germany as well. So technically, there was no unemployment in the Soviet Union either. Full employment is actually not desired in an economy for a variety of reasons. Here's an old paper on the subject: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40729034?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents http://www.jstor.org/stable/40729034?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con... The Soviet Union was hell, the same for East Germany. There was a reason there were weeks of parties in Berlin when the wall came down. There aren't any homeless in North Korea either.. doesn't mean it's even remotely close to a model society.
  • fennecfoxen 11y ago
    I'm not sure how the anecdote here is related to the opinion. They don't seem to support each other in an obvious way. As for the bums/homeless/etc, I'm not sure that being unable to find them is always a strict win: it's easy enough to disappear undesirables to prisons or camps (or just shallow graves).
• Yetanfou 11y ago
  No, it does not. It is clear that the Soviet Union, for all its flaws, was one of the foremost nations (or collection of such) when it comes to scientific endeavours. Where they failed was in the translation of scientific data to 'products', but that is another story. Modern Russia still has its share of eminent scientists, but they lack the s(t)olid backing of a nation which felt like it had something to prove.
  • dharma1 11y ago
    That was kind of my point - at least in terms of science they have regressed. Wonder what kind of state support for scientific endeavours they have today?
  • briandear 11y ago
    Lysenkoism was certainly a highlight of the Soviet sciences. Mendelian inheritance was considered a capitalist fabrication.
    • Yetanfou 11y ago
      What Lysenkoism was to the Soviet Union, is Creationism to the United States of America. Both 'doctrines' are completely nonsensical, but supported by strong religious currents in their respective environments. It just so happened the state religion in the Soviet Union had mortal gods versus the man-on-the-cloud of the born-again evangelical religion entertained by some recent US leaders.
      • kryptiskt 11y ago
        People were persecuted and killed because of Lysenkoism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov Your false equivalences trivializes that persecution.
        • Yetanfou 11y ago
          I'd put this persecution more in the hands of Stalin and his cronies. He hardly needed an excuse to persecute and kill anyone, after all.