[blfr]

It doesn't work like that. The Soviet Union which had some of the most tightly controlled access to information, and didn't have to worry about the Internet, managed to stay at the cutting edge of science and technology, even sometimes outpacing the west. The communist economy couldn't support it but that's a different problem.

[jasonzemos]

That's because they stole it. When you stand on the shoulders of giants it's not difficult to take the next step. In cases where the Soviets outpaced the west, most notably in the space race, they did so for lack of prudence. The US could only tolerate at most one accident (Apollo 1) else the entire endeavor would have been jeopardized. Rigorous testing, empirical investigation, and redundancy all imposed costs on the US. The Soviets instead just devalued human life and kept all their failures secret, lowering their cost to gain agility for progress.

In the end the Soviets produced a very small amount of organic peer-reviewed cutting edge research in contrast to the west. Worse, the politics impressed on its academics lead to Lysenkoism.

[blfr]

They stole some of it but that is what jacquesm is advocating: copying ideas. And in the space race they were also first with the unmanned Sputnik with no such safety concerns.

[blattimwind]

Common perception is that Soviet electroncis were generally 10-15 years behind.

[TheNorthman]

Common perception is that the US contributed the most to ending WW2 (Not the opinion at the time)

Common perception is also that the US won the space race (Not the opinion at the time outside the US).

Perhaps "common perception" isn't the right metric to go by.

[jacquesm]

It depends on whose perception. Common as in 'the world' is something that we don't really have so you are always going to have to go by some locally colored version of events.

The US eventually did win the space race, but they lost Rounds 1 and 2 to Russia. The United States getting involved in WW2 when they could no longer ignore it ended up getting the formidable American industrial engine engaged in ways that had Japan been a little bit smarter might have seen a completely different ending to WW2.

The US view is that they did all the heavy lifting, when in fact Canada and the UK did given the relative sizes of their population at the time made a disproportionate difference in Western Europe, but America was definitely very important while in the East Russia made the biggest difference. In the pacific it really was the United States that made the difference.

Perception when simplified to the point where it makes no sense isn't the right metric to go by, but with some nuance it can actually be quite useful.

[TheNorthman]

> The US eventually did win the space race

They did _because they started a new round_. What the US did is equivalent to losing badly and then screaming "Last goal wins" repeatedly until you score the last goal. Yes, US sources claim a US victory. That doesn't mean they actually won.

> The US view is that they did all the heavy lifting,

The Soviet Union was responsible for ~80% of german casualties. The Soviets made a difference in Western Europe by winning in the east. It's what killed the german propaganda machine.

[kortilla]

> They did _because they started a new round_. What the US did is equivalent to losing badly and then screaming "Last goal wins" repeatedly until you score the last goal.

That’s a senseless analogy. There was no game with structured rules about number of rounds, etc.

That’s like claiming someone only won a war because they kept fighting until the other side gave up and didn’t want to fight anymore.

[adventured]

> The Soviet Union was responsible for ~80% of german casualties.

None of which would have been possible without the extraordinary industrial might of the US that kept the USSR supplied. They had no capacity to fight minus being supplied.

Do you know how much territory the European allies had reclaimed in the years of fighting prior to the US invasion of Europe? None. There is no scenario where Nazi Germany gets defeated without the US supplies and invasion and the USSR leadership openly admitted exactly that privately.

Here's a map at the time of Normandy in 1944 (WW2 of course began in 1939):

https://omniatlas.com/assets/img/articles/complete/europe/eu...

Notice anything interesting? The Germans hadn't lost any territory in nearly five years of war.

The US was a liberator of Europe. It didn't keep half of Western Europe for itself. Do you know what the Soviets were by comparison? It was the 1,900,000 US soldiers, backed with US supplies and nukes (to stand off the Soviet conquerors in the East), that enabled Western Europe to become free after the war.

The USSR would not have even been able to keep its trains functioning without the US supplies. The US gave them nearly 2,000 locomotives.

It included 12,000+ airplanes. 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. 400,000 jeeps and cargo trucks. 8,000 tractors. 12,000 armored vehicles, including 7,000 tanks. 35,000 motorcycles. 1.5 million blankets. 15 million pairs of boots. Four million tons of food supplies. And a vast amount of energy supplies.

Between Dec 1941 and August 1945, the allies consumed seven billion barrels of oil. The US supplied six billion of those barrels.

So the US kept the USSR in the war with its industry, while fighting two massive war fronts simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

[TheNorthman]

> and the USSR leadership openly admitted exactly that privately.

This sentence is nonsense. They publicly (not privately) thanked the US for their aid.

Besides, your framing of the war is obviously false. The allies had lost the war up until about ~1943, where they started gaining momentum. A turning point I'd like to point out is the Battle of Kursk, in which the Germans for the first time cancelled a major operation. Sure, the invasion of Sicily played a role in their decision, but the battles weren't even on the same scale (14k casualties vs 370k in Kursk).

Also the lend-lease is a false equivalence. Yes, the "industrial might" played a role, but the US hadn't lost 25 million men to the war. Their capacity for production was higher because they weren't sending everyone to their death. The US even saw population growth during the war. The Soviet Union only saw their loses replaced during the mid-50s.

The US played their part, but make no mistake in the difference between 11 billion USD and 25 million men.

[ClumsyPilot]

How does it compare with domestic production?

Best I can remember, USSR produced about as many tanks as the rest of the world combined during the period.

[boomboomsubban]

>There is no scenario where Nazi Germany gets defeated without the US supplies and invasion and the USSR leadership openly admitted exactly that privately.

Without the USSR involved in the war, US supplies would be unable to help stop the Germans and the German forces would not be spread thin enough for an invasion to be feasible. Both were necessary, but the Soviets gave up much more to secure the victory.

[YarickR2]

Propaganda at work. USSR didn't _need_ to be supplied; it had resources. Lend lease helped,but wasn't crucial.

[brownbat]

I know it's somewhat fashionable to say it was all really just a Russian/German war. You rightly point out the contributions of Canada and the UK relative to population. But I have one defense of the naive "but but the US mattered!" view...

Khrushchev and Stalin readily admitted that they would have been quickly overrun by the Germans without the US basically flooding the Eastern front with fuel, trucks, munitions and other support. US readymade military support to Russia amounted to something like a seventh of Russia's GDP.

Between 1943 and 1945, the United States built more ships than had existed in the world before 1939. The US built and crewed more aircraft than the rest of the world combined. The US provided a third of the raw materials, tools, and transport the Soviet Army used. It was the industrial backbone of all of the Allied armies. It brought the Allied to Axis GDP ratio to 5/1 by the end of the war.

Which is just a mere footnote, if your model of warfare completely discounts the importance of logistics and materiel. Or if you believe that the industrial warmaking capacity of your opponent is irrelevant to whether or not you sue for peace.

I know it's tempting to say that contributions don't "count" unless they involve deaths, but, as one notable WWII participant once said, "No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country."

Stalin put it this way: the British bought time, the Americans brought gold, and Russians provided blood.

To be fair, it would be distortative to diminish any of those contributions.

With apologies to: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066206/ and https://www.quora.com/How-was-the-American-contribution-in-W...

People should learn more about lend lease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

[jacobush]

Everything else aside, the German industry must have been incredibly strong to withstand the rest of the world against it for so long. Such a double tragedy it was wasted on a horrible war effort in instead of furthering humanity.

[int_19h]

It wasn't that strong, though. That's precisely why there's a popular opinion that Germany was done by 1943, pretty much regardless of anything else - they've spent their own industry while failing to sufficiently cripple the Soviet one. The question then wasn't about who'd win the war, but how long it would take, how many more casualties, and what the map of Europe would be after.

[CamperBob2]

Exactly, which is why this argument is so stupid. The evil posed by the Axis was of such a magnitude that it took everyone else working together, all over the world, to end it.

Arguing over who did the most good in WWII is as pointless as arguing over whether Hiroshima or Dresden or Bataan or Unit 731 was the greater atrocity. The only lesson that endures is that humanity shouldn't do any of this stuff again, ever.

[billfruit]

The two countries with the most casualties in the world war 2, were the Soviet Union and China, and their numbers dwarf that of all other combatants.

[CamperBob2]

Some things aren't a matter of opinion. Look at Buran, for instance [1]. (This is why it's so frustrating as an American to acknowledge that we can't even put humans in space anymore.)

Another good example is Ken Shirriff's recent blog entry, which includes some notes comparing the degree of IC technology in US versus Soviet space hardware of similar vintage: http://www.righto.com/2020/01/inside-digital-clock-from-soyu...

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/38kfhn/new_photos_of...

[rimliu]

The other side: in USSR we were not even taught about WWII. It was "The Great Patriotic War". And it was all Red Army vs. Germans.

[ClumsyPilot]

I was taught in the Russian school system, and while it's true that main emphasis is on the eastern front, but the rest of the world is broadly represented.

I have never meant a person that was not aware of the other fronts, and did not know at least the broad strokes of France/normandy/etc.

[rimliu]

Well, the time I am talking about was the last decade of the USSR. Access to information was way more limited then.

[pintxo]

Given that the US currently I has no vehicle to bring people to the ISS, it look like they lost in the long(er) term. /s

[billfruit]

There was almost 10 year gap I think from the last SkyLab mission to the first flight of the shuttle,when Americans had no capsule available for manned missions.

[chucksmash]

It has been nearly nine years since the US lost the capacity for manned space flight so there's a kernel of truth, /s or not.

This is an interesting time to be following along, as SpaceX just completed an in-flight abort test last weekend which was - by all appearances - a success.

According to spaceflightnow.com, the manned follow-up mission which will launch astronauts to the ISS on a Crew Dragon capsule, DM2, could happen within the next 50-100 days[1]:

> The schedule for the Demo-2 launch with Hurley and Behnken will partly be determined by a NASA decision in the coming weeks on whether to extend the length of their mission at the space station from a short-duration stay of about a week to an expedition that might last as long as several months.

> Bridenstine said the Demo-2 crew will have to undergo additional training to perform duties on the space station if NASA extends Hurley and Behnken’s mission.

> Kathy Lueders, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, suggested Friday that the Demo-2 mission might be ready for launch as soon as the first half of March.

> But it’s more likely to happen in April — at the soonest — when the space station’s crew is downsized to three people through October, assuming no U.S. crew launches in that period.

For those who missed it, the in-flight abort test itself was interesting[2].

[1]: https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/01/19/spacex-aces-final-majo...

[2]: https://youtu.be/mu5Ydz34oVc

[monadic2]

Common perception about soviet anything is generally wrong, at least in the us.

[rimliu]

This one is not. Computers were clones (IBM?), cameras were clones made on equipment brought from Germany, cars were clones of FIAT. (I grew up in USSR, for what it matters).

[blattimwind]

It's not like you could just walk up to some preserved soviet microelectronics and compare their technical sophostication (e.g. metal layers, feature sizes, power density) to contemporary Western technology.

[int_19h]

Not in this case, from personal experience living in the last years of the USSR. I remember just how "magic" the microwave ovens were to us, and how much better non-Soviet-made tape players and recorders were.

[CamperBob2]

And yet, we're still here, and they're gone.

I guess that's our fault, huh. It always is.

[monadic2]

The people of the USSR are most certainly still around.

[WanderPanda]

Maybe you didn‘t win each sprint, but you definitely won the marathon

[CamperBob2]

Eh, I dunno. We'll see. There are indications that the race didn't actually end, but took a turn through some very dark woods.

And unless your name is Pheidippides, there's not much point in winning a marathon if you die on the other side of the finish line.

[billfruit]

On the other hand Soviets were at par with the West in Mathematics, Control Theory, etc. I kind of feel there is a tendency to downplay their achievements, fuel by cold war era sentiments.

[jacquesm]

Well, witness North Korea in the present day, and many other dictatorships besides, they usually lose their ability to innovate about as fast as they bury their dissidents.

[blfr]

Chinese came up with many inventions (gun powder, printing press, ocean faring ships) we consider civilization-defining and didn't do much with them. Meanwhile Europeans took them to new heights and conquered the world.

A level of individualism is probably the most important factor and fairly incompatible with totalitarian regimes but wide access to information isn't nearly as crucial as infovores assume.

[noizejoy]

I can’t help but wonder how much it really matters, if you have cutting edge technology that nobody gets to use, because your economy can’t get it into enough hands.

[jacobush]

They were substantially large, which must be accounted for. Large enough to be a mirror universe, sort of. Turkey is not. Maybe China will be.