Was The Soviet Union Responsible For Any Scientific/Technological Breakthroughs?

[deevee]

Certainly Russians have contributed their share, Igor Sikorsky comes immediately to mind, but what about the Soviet era? Did the Soviets contribute anything to the advancement of civilization or were their finest minds too busy reverse engineering pirated Western technology?

[Ravenman]

Well, Sputnik was quite an achievement.

[Captain Amazing]

So was Tetris.

[Capt. Ridley's Shooting Party]

Didn't Russian doctors pioneer the use of Phage viruses to fight bacterial infections.

or something

[astro]

IIRC the Russians did some interesting, ground breaking stuff in design and materials, but it was mainly military related (esp subs and aircraft) and wasn't readily transferable to non-miltary uses and also didn't (obviously) get much press. They also did some interesting stuff with Tokomak style fusion research even though the design didn't prove out.

[CalMeacham]

I thought it was absurd that the Reagan white house was making such a big deal about Russian work on particle accelerators at the height of SDI debate , when their stuff was published in the open literature. They ceertainly did make contributions.


Along the same lines, the original papers on EM analysis for Stealth design were Russian. According to the book Skunk Works, the author was later invited to see the American stuff built based upon his papers. Crazy world.

[toadspittle]

Originally Posted by Ravenman

Well, Sputnik was quite an achievement.

I agree--they pretty well mopped up in the space race. We won out on the moon, and they admittedly had some nasty casualties on their side. But they got to space first with a satellite, dog, man, and woman; and Mir broke seventeen different kinds of records. The Russians' current rocket engines (a result of Soviet work) are still considered to be better than anyone else's in the world.

[Captain Amazing]

More seriously, the Soviets first invented the tokamak reactior, which will probably make fusion energy possible (and, as a side benefit to this discovered a lot about high energy plasma). Scientists in the Soviet Union also first studied Cherenkov radiation, and did groundbreaking work on superconductivity as well as quantum physics.

Soviets won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1958, 1962, 1964, and 1978, and the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1956.

[Acsenray]

According to a report today on Morning Edition, the Soviets (with the help of their ex-Nazi scientists, naturally), perfected the gas centrifuge method of uranium enrichment. Prior to that, the United States was using the gaseous diffusion method.

[Wesley Clark]

Originally Posted by Dominic Mulligan

Didn't Russian doctors pioneer the use of Phage viruses to fight bacterial infections.

or something

I thought people were looking into that in the 1800s and quit when people started discovering vaccines. So the Russians didn't invent it but they probably did some work with it.

[ArrMatey!]

Perhaps not the 'tech' you're looking for, but post-revolution, Soviet Russia came up with a lot of what we consider standard movie-making techniques. For instance, the idea of a film montage was created by a russian film-maker (and has kind-of a fun story behind it).

[CynicalGabe]

Originally Posted by toadspittle

I agree--they pretty well mopped up in the space race. We won out on the moon, and they admittedly had some nasty casualties on their side.\

1. Apollo 1
2. Challenger
3. Columbia
4. Skylab

People like to make jokes about how Mir was a piece of junk, but it lasted many years longer than our aborted attempt did.

When the American shuttle fleet was grounded, the US resoted to using Russian space capsules to get people and cargo "upstairs".

As far as I'm concerned, the Soviets/Russians had and have a far better record in space flight than the US does. If the country weren't so poor now, they'd give us a run for our money.

And don't forget the KGB's pioneering work in photo manipulation.

[Duke of Rat]

Originally Posted by CynicalGabe

As far as I'm concerned, the Soviets/Russians had and have a far better record in space flight than the US does.

Better as in they were able to kill a far greater number of people than the US in their attempts? Better in the fact that no Soviet has ever set foot on any body other than Earth? They had some shining moments, but taken as a whole, I don't think their space program was better by a long shot.

[Airman Doors, USAF]

Originally Posted by CynicalGabe

1. Apollo 1
2. Challenger
3. Columbia
4. Skylab

Skylab was not intended to last. It was supposed to last longer than it did, yes, but it still served its purpose. The Soviets also lost people on reentry and on the pad, and while I can't recall any Soviets dying on takeoff they had a much higher failure rate than we did.

People like to make jokes about how Mir was a piece of junk, but it lasted many years longer than our aborted attempt did.

Mir was a nice accomplishment, but toward the end it was being held together with baling wire and prayer. It was long past obsolete when it finally died. The Soviets and then the Russians in turn kept it up for prestige purposes.

When the American shuttle fleet was grounded, the US resoted to using Russian space capsules to get people and cargo "upstairs".

That's because in our infinite wisdom we got rid of most of our heavy-lifting capabilities and put all our eggs into one basket with the Shuttle. In that respect the Russians were "smarter", although how much of that was due to the fact that they couldn't afford to keep up the Buran is debateable.

[cmkeller]

Mir was a nice accomplishment, but toward the end it was being held together with baling wire and prayer.

From Commie Atheists?

[deevee]

Originally Posted by ArrMatey!

Perhaps not the 'tech' you're looking for, but post-revolution, Soviet Russia came up with a lot of what we consider standard movie-making techniques. For instance, the idea of a film montage was created by a russian film-maker (and has kind-of a fun story behind it).

That was from " Battleship Potemkin" wasn't it? I also forgot about Sputnik since NASA very quickly eclipsed the Soviet space program. I suppose one could also include their technique for embalming dead communist leaders. Apparently Kim Il Sung got the Lenin treatment.

[Cervaise]

Originally Posted by acsenray

According to a report today on Morning Edition, the Soviets (with the help of their ex-Nazi scientists, naturally), perfected the gas centrifuge method of uranium enrichment. Prior to that, the United States was using the gaseous diffusion method.

This is what I was going to mention. They were providing historical background for the current controversies about Iran and North Korea pursuing nuclear power. Listen to it here.

[Revtim]

They were pioneers in bringing dead dogs back to life.
http://www.archive.org/details/Experime1940

[CandidGamera]

In Soviet Russia, Science researches you!

[HPL]

According to Yakov Smirnov, 2-way televisions.

[CynicalGabe]

Originally Posted by CandidGamera

In Soviet Russia, Science researches you!

I actually laughed out loud at this one.

So I justifiably use the phrase "lol".

[Jurph]

Originally Posted by CynicalGabe

As far as I'm concerned, the Soviets/Russians had and have a far better record in space flight than the US does. If the country weren't so poor now, they'd give us a run for our money.

"As far as you're concerned" meaning "you have no actual background in Soviet rocket history"? Let me introduce you to the worst space-related disaster in history: the Marshal Nedelin Incident, in which 91 people perished. Here's a slightly-different retelling of the disaster.

Yes, Soviet rocket hardware was (is?) more reliable than US hardware, but their manufacturing capabilities were never on par with ours. Their designs were brilliant but the execution was flawed; we had the exact opposite problem of perfectly-built flawed designs. The trouble was that their centrally-planned economy was never going to be able to execute their designs to spec.

Sergey Korolev came up with some brilliant advances in rocketry, but he was only one man. Think of him as the Russian sequel to Wehrner von Braun. After his death in 1966, there were a very small number of disciples who were able to carry on his legacy, and most of them were hamstrung by the politics and bureaucracy of the aging USSR. A few other advances -- road-mobile ICBMs, reliable solid-fuel rockets -- came out of the USSR, but their manned spaceflight program fell behind ours around the same time Korolev died.

[Ike Witt]

Originally Posted by ArrMatey!

Perhaps not the 'tech' you're looking for, but post-revolution, Soviet Russia came up with a lot of what we consider standard movie-making techniques. For instance, the idea of a film montage was created by a russian film-maker (and has kind-of a fun story behind it).

Sergei Eisenstein and the Moscow montage.

[tomndebb]

Who did "better" in the space department is a matter for IMHO (because everyone has a different opinion and it isn't worth a Great Debate), but regardless who did "better," the Soviets were certainly competitors who pushed our (Earth's) knowledge further, particularly in the area of survivability in long term space missions and the effects on humans.

- - -

Back to the OP, the Soviet Dr. Fyodorov expanded the work on Radial Keratotomy (originally investigated in Columbia) to the point where later investigators had a jump-off point for Lasik surgery.

I do not recall specific break out contributions, but Soviet medicine was a steady contributor to medical advances for many years (at least when the government was not suppressing the conclusions).

[fiddlesticks]

The flaws inherent in the Shuttle design, as revealed by the Columbia disaster and the too close for comfort repeat during Discovery's launch (the now obvious lesson: keep the re-entry vehicle above all other pieces of the rocket), mean that for the foreseeable future the Russians have a monopoly on *reliable* manned space transport systems with their Soyuz. The closely related unmanned Progress ships are also absolutely indespensible to keeping the ISS inhabited and running. A good chunk of the $100 billion NASA wants to spend to get back to the Moon will be spent in re-engineering the Apollo CSM design, which is basically exactly what the Russians have had in the Soyuz all along.

[Stranger On A Train]

Originally Posted by Duke of Rat

Better as in they were able to kill a far greater number of people than the US in their attempts? Better in the fact that no Soviet has ever set foot on any body other than Earth? They had some shining moments, but taken as a whole, I don't think their space program was better by a long shot.

The irony of this is that we're totally dependant on Russia for manned access to space at this moment, and have been (except for STS-114) for two and a half years now. And in terms of operational flight losses, we've lost 14 astronauts (with several near misses in Gemini and Apollo) as compared to 4 (or possibly 5) by the Soviet programs. (Deaths in ground operations and training are another matter and depends upon the criteria you use, but it still doesn't paint a sterling picture of the US program with respect to the Soviets/Russians.)

So far, the only self-contained manned space program that hasn't had deaths is the Chinese program...and they've only lobbed one body into space. Their time will come, too; space exploration is hazardous and uncertain, relying on extremely complicated machinery operating in extreme environments.

Originally Posted by toadspittle

The Russians' current rocket engines (a result of Soviet work) are still considered to be better than anyone else's in the world.

Well, let's qualify this by saying that they are the most reliable engines in the world, and in fact Boeing is using the Zenit booster from the Buran program in their SeaLaunch program. But the Saturn-utilized F-1 is still the most powerful single engine every developed, and the Shuttle Main Engines are the most efficient for weight.

We (westerners, and especially Americans) like to portray the Soviets as being incompetent and backward because of their crappy manufacturing infrastructure and debilitatingly compartmentalized research during the Cold War. But in fact, the Russians are as well noted for their developments in physics, medicine, chemistry, materials science, mathematics, et cetera as they are for their literature and chessmanship. Their crippling political and economic system is what kept them from being more widely known and revered as contributors to modern science and technology. The Soviets had their Lysenko and Beria; we had our Proxmire and McCarthy. We readily jettisoned our baggage when Reason stirred; the Soviets had to live with their legacy of deliberate obtuseness for decades.

Stranger

[David Simmons]

I do believe that Soviet military aircraft were second to none. We were surprised at the MIG-15 in Korea. But of course we are always surprised at the accomplishments of others as we were at the abilities of the Japanese Zero at the outset of WWII.

I hope we get over that fault some day, but I'm not overly optimistic.

[CBCD]

TRIZ, an approach to innovative problem solving, was developed by Genrich Altschuller, a Ruskie.

[CynicalGabe]

Originally Posted by CBCD

TRIZ, an approach to innovative problem solving, was developed by Genrich Altschuller, a Ruskie.

In Soviet Russia, problems solve you?


No? Sorry.

[Eva Luna]

What about in medicine? The Ilizarov device, which was what repaired my severely fractured leg, was Soviet-developed. Some info.

I wouldn't call the Ilizarov experience fun, or a scientific discovery on a scale with fusion or a space program, but it meant a lot to me.

[MrDarkness]

Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin and Vostok happened not because of Soviet-developed science, but because of the spoils of WWII--captured German rocket scientists. So did the Mercury project, but it took a while longer. Their spoils may have been better than ours.

My apologies to Werner Von Braun

[Tristan]

Originally Posted by David Simmons

I do believe that Soviet military aircraft were second to none. We were surprised at the MIG-15 in Korea. But of course we are always surprised at the accomplishments of others as we were at the abilities of the Japanese Zero at the outset of WWII.

I hope we get over that fault some day, but I'm not overly optimistic.

Surprised, yes, but certainly not beaten.

While we were loosing our edge as time went on, our ECM was hands down better than the Soviets.

[Ranchoth]

The Soviets built a water-powered analog computer in the 30s, which is kinda impressive.

[CynicalGabe]

Originally Posted by Ranchoth

The Soviets built a water-powered analog computer in the 30s, which is kinda impressive.

That is bloody brilliant.

[Bob55]

Originally Posted by Dominic Mulligan

Didn't Russian doctors pioneer the use of Phage viruses to fight bacterial infections.

or something

Not invent but the first to actually use. Very interstersting stuff which I worked on for a bit. It may one day return as a form of treatment against microbial infections since the phages are very specific and replicate at the sight of infection. The only downside is they're extremely immunogenic, so your own body gives them a good whooping. Good for a 1-time shot maybe as a last resort though.

Cutting/pasting from one of my own presentations on the subject:

1915 - Frederick Twort discovered bacteriophages.

1919 – Felix d’Herelle administered a single dose of bacteriophage to a 12-year-old boy suffering from severe dysentery – he fully recovered.

1921 – staphylococcal skin disease successfully treated. d’Herelle went on to treat thousands of people in India infected with Cholera and Bubonic Plague.

The antibiotic revolution pushed phage therapy research to the back burner in the West, but research continued in the Soviet Union. During World War II Russian soldiers carried vials of bacteriophages to treat their wounds or dysentery.

[Kimstu]

The Soviets also did a lot of outstanding work in mathematics. I can't find data on how many Fields Medalists (the Fields is sort of the math equivalent of a Nobel Prize) during the Soviet era were from the USSR, but IIRC there were quite a few. A lot of effort in non-Russian mathematical societies was devoted to keeping up with and translating the Russian publications.

[bonzer]

During the Soviet era itself, the USSR actually didn't do that conspiciously well in winning Fields Medals. Through to 1990 there were only 3 such winners out of 34 overall: Novikov (1970), Margulis (1978) and Drinfel'd (1990). But there were considerable political complications, including the Soviets boycotting the first few congresses where the decisions being made and both Novikov and Margulis being refused permission to collect their medals.
Although he didn't win until 1994, Efim Zelmanov got it for work done in the USSR.
The two subsequent Russian-born winners - Kontsevich (1998) and Voevodsky (2002) - both emigrated to do their graduate studies and so probably shouldn't count.

Michael Monastyrsky's Modern Mathematics in the Light of the Fields Medals (1991; A.K. Peters, 1996) is a nice little account of the subject from a Russian perspective.

From first hand experience, while the emigration of Soviet-trained theorists to the West in the early 90s had a devastating effect on Russian physics at home, it was immensely fruitful to the subject in both the US and Europe. We were all exposed to different ways of thinking and I've nothing but respect for the quality of the theoretical physics the Soviet-era tradition in the subject produced.

[ArrMatey!]

Originally Posted by deevee

That was from " Battleship Potemkin" wasn't it?

Actually, I hate to disagree with Adam Yax, but I was speaking of Kuleshov. Eisenstein was one of his students / friends / comrades / fellow film-makers (depending on who you ask), but Kuleshov did an experiment that involved, in essence, making the first film montage and showing that people could actually draw connections between the scenes that weren't necesarilly there (ie- the two people you see talking are, indeed, talking to each other, although we never see them in the same frame. Pretty basic today, but mind-blowing stuff back then.)

[scm1001]

according to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/88802.stm
" lightbulb, the radio and the television.- Neck ties from Italy, jeans from USA - they're all Russian inventions."
so there!

one I can vouch for that changed the modern world (else no good vibrations!) was the theremin ( http://www.obsolete.com/120_years/machines/theremin/ )

[ambushed]

Originally Posted by acsenray

...Prior to that, the United States was using the gaseous diffusion method.

The US simultaneously used several different methods to seperate U235 from natural uranium, including gas centrifuge, mass-spectrometer, gaseous diffusion, and thermal diffusion. The Soviet Union, although it knew almost all of our Manhattan Project secrets from spying the hell out of us, thought that their method was the best. It wasn't.



Obviously, their method was good enough, though.

[What Exit?]

Originally Posted by cmkeller

From Commie Atheists?

They were back to being Russian of various faiths by then.


Their space program was very good. It has often been discussed that the Soviets were not worried about moonwalks but had hopes of an orbital weopons platform. Reagan co-opted this and scared the shit out of them very badly from what I have read.

[T_SQUARE]

Didn't the Ruskies do some of the early work in Laser eye surgery? I can't prove that, but do know a friend of mine's father, who was one of the first to do it the US, went to Russia for a couple months to confer with their surgeons.

[smiling bandit]

IIRC, much of the discovery of radial keratomy work was largely accident. Some kid in Russia was in an auto accident and tiny glass shards sliced his eye in a rough, but workable radial pattern. His eyesight then improved noticably, and Russian scientists started looking into how it happened.

[Revtim]

I recall seeing pictures of RK patients being worked on in assembly-line fashion. Sounds like a joke about socialist medicine, but I had no doubts it was real when I saw it.

[bonzer]

Originally Posted by ambushed

The US simultaneously used several different methods to seperate U235 from natural uranium, including gas centrifuge, mass-spectrometer, gaseous diffusion, and thermal diffusion. The Soviet Union, although it knew almost all of our Manhattan Project secrets from spying the hell out of us, thought that their method was the best. It wasn't.

Obviously, their method was good enough, though.

Not quite - though I can see how one might get this impression from Richard Rhodes's discussion of the point in Dark Sun (Simon&Schuster, 1995, esp. p71-2). David Holloway, in particular, suggests a rather different emphasis in his somewhat more detailed account of the matter in Stalin and the Bomb (Yale, 1994).
Both point to Kurchatov's 7/3/43 memo as the key distillation and assessment of what was known to the Soviets on the subject from intelligence reports. Most of the material in this derived from British sources, at a time when the US wasn't sharing its nuclear research with London. So Kurchatov's recommendation at this point to prefer centifuges to gaseous diffusion was actually him disputing the British conclusion at the time. Rhodes then infers that this recommendation stood until well after the end of the war, with the Soviets concentrating on centrifuges.
However, the intelligence picture changed towards the end of the same year, not least because, once transatlantic cooperation started, one of the Tube Alloys scientists sent to the US was Klaus Fuchs. From December 1943 he was privy to the US progress on gaseous diffusion and at some point in 1944 transmitted this information to Moscow. Holloway suggests that it's at this point that the Soviets had to reassess Kurchatov's recommendation.
At this stage the Soviet research on all methods of isotope separation was still experimental, with no decision as to what plants would be built. Come the end of the war, their bomb project immediately moved into a higher gear and - no doubt influenced by what the US had done - they invested heavily in trying out electromagnetic, gaseous and thermal methods. The last was quickly dropped and they started building industrial scaled electromagnetic and gaseous diffusion plants in early 1946. By early 1951, the latter had come to dominate.
By contrast, their centrifuge research was also well funded in the same period, but of no major significance. (There was a 1950 proposal to build a small plant to supplement gaseous diffusion, but that was never built.) It's only in the 1950s that their investment in the likes of Konrad Zippe, who'd been brought from Germany at the end of the war, began to pay off. Only after these innovative improvements in the technology did they switch to centrifuges as the prefered method.

Holloway even suggested that the Soviets would have been better off concentrating on centrifuges in 1945, given that that eventually became the best solution. But, if nothing else, that's with the benefit of hindsight.

[Snickers]

The Russkis landed a probe on Venus. Venus! That's impressive.

[Revtim]

Originally Posted by Snickers

The Russkis landed a probe on Venus. Venus! That's impressive.

Yeah, they even sent back pictures of the surface. The pics on those pages of Sagan's 'Cosmos' fascinated me endlessly as a child.

[bauble]

Originally Posted by Revtim

Yeah, they even sent back pictures of the surface. The pics on those pages of Sagan's 'Cosmos' fascinated me endlessly as a child.

OK - I'd not heard of this. Can anyone provide a link to those pictures ? I'd really like to see them.

[Revtim]

Originally Posted by bauble

OK - I'd not heard of this. Can anyone provide a link to those pictures ? I'd really like to see them.

Here's some, maybe even all of them, in this BBC news article.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3387895.stm

I don't recall there being many pics.

[Revtim]

Eh, screw those pics, check this out:
http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_DigitalImages.htm
These are actually the reworked pics that the article was about.