Soviet Engineering Capabilities

Russian here. Unfortunately, our technological success was mostly limited to military production. And even there, quite a lot of technological processes and templates were simply stolen by our spies (starting from our nuclear weapons program). Granted, Americans used to do that too... USSR used to have a lot of independent discoveries and inventions. But nearly all of them were targeted to the military; Soviet cars, television sets, washing machines etc. were all truly awful.

USSR was very famous for reverse engineering western tech and not paying anything for that.

How come the soviets were so amazing at engineering?

Scientists were treated as slaves in soviet union projects... hope the tsmc engineers read the fine print.EDIT with source: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/soviet-s...

Th soviet mechanical and rf engineering efforts were very well regarded during the early cold war period, and I would argue, much more sophisticated. Language did not stop the USSR. It was the economic policy like banning some disciplines based on ideological grounds like cybernetics etc.Check it out, the things for which a western scientist or engineer is given credit, were discovered/invented much earlier by soviet counterparts! What do you think about Kotelnikov?

of course you do not have idea of what I am smoking. I smoked a lot of technical documentation in the 90-ies. The USSR had some sort of the Internet over radio for antiaircraft missiles distributed squadrons. Completely original. It had global ultra long wave system for submarines communication. And of course it had original competing computer architectures. That was not competition as you know it. Normally state financed a bunch of perspective tech, but only few best suited for economical situa

> It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universeThey also had an extensive industrial espionage program. In particular, most of the integrated circuits made in the Soviet Union were not original designs. They were verbatim copies of Western op-amps, logic gates, and CPUs. They had pin- and instruction-compa

Do tell more! How behind was the Soviet Union in computing (if indeed it was behind) compared to other countries at the time?

As I understand it... one of the reasons why the Soviets fell behind in computer technology was because back in the 60s, while Soviet engineers had good designs that were state-of-the-art for the era, the communist economic planners estimated the requirements for computer manufacture to be one per university or government department for a total of maybe a few thousand, while Western manufacturers were getting orders into the tens or hundreds of thousands... and they had to come up with new techn

Well, it is true. The Soviet Union leadership in the highest levels believed that reverse-engineering existing technology is better than recreating it. Obviously, the USSR wasn't going to pay licensing and patent fees to the capitalist West, right? If this is insulting, blame the Politburo and the Central Military Commission.In fact, not reinventing the wheel allowed for the great scientific and engineering achievements that the Soviet Union did have.