I know they are different, but not radically. It was a stolen technology beyond Russian capabilities that the Russians obviously copied and built upon.
The British also had B-29’s (postwar I believe), and they called their version the Boeing Washington.
No.
First, the weapons are internally so different as to completely rule out the ‘copy’ bit.
Second, the Soviet small-arms industry was (and is) quite capable of innovation and creativity in their own right.
Even the site you cited (alliteration anyone?) states that they are different.
The Soviets were quite capable of creating the AK-47 themselves, and in fact, if any copying was done, it appears that that Kalashnakov copied individual features from a couple of American designs. While Kalashnokov acknowledges inspecting an example of the StG-44, he’s quite clear that he did not copy the weapon, and an examination of the two rifles bears him out.
Not in that particular case. Listen to Tranquilis, he knows what he’s saying. The Russians/Soviets had been working on “Avtomats” (selective-fire infantry rifles and light MGs, firing lighter-load cartridges than old-school bolt rifles and fixed MGs) since well before WW2 – the Fedorov avtomat served in the Russian Civil War. The StG44 may have provided a “but of course, that’s it!” push, but the AK was within their capabilities.
I’m only trying to make the case for the German StG44 having been the origin of the AK-47, analogous and similar to the American and Soviet appropriation of German Rocket Science and Scientists. It is undeniable that the German StG44 was the innovation and groundwork that made the Ak-47 possible. The Germans invented the assault rifle and made the technological leap. It was appropriated and adapted in the unique Soviet way that the OP infers.
We also have the SS-1A, a copy of the V-2, which later gave rise to the “Scud” missile series. (Actually, that last link says that the later Scuds were based off the German “Wasserfall” rocket.)
You’re still making too strong a link, though you’re moving in the right direction - The Soviets were already moving in that direction on their own. Certainly the StG-44 was an impetus, but the Soviets had already started work down that path. Mostly, Kalashnikov was inspired by the ‘kurtz’ round that the StG-44 used. He’s pretty contemptuous of the German rifle’s workings, stating “I immediately saw how I could do it better.” He then proceded to create a masterpeice of simplicity, reliablity, and robustness.
There’s no doubt that he took inspiration, but it’s clear he also used his own ideas to realize his creation. The AK is arguably inspired by the StG-44, not a copy of it.
The Lada was actually built under license from Fiat. They didn’t steal it. The problem was they made the same basic car for a long time. Long after Fiat themselves had dumped the car.
I don’t think my claims are too strong based on this cite.
Except that wikipedia isn’t really as cite. Anyone can put anything into a wikipedia article - that’s the downfall of open source editing. Anyone else can come back and correct it, which is the beauty of open source editing, but a lot goes unedited. Unless you have a cite from a primary or secondary source you’d like to produce, I still think that you are underappreciating the abilities and capabilities of Soviet arms designers. They didn’t need inspiration for the Germans to produce the T-34, after all.
Implication being that he examined the StG44, copied that preexisting design and improved upon it.
Sheesh!.. I’m done nitpicking.
I’ve also read that Stalin and the KGB had spies in every industrial establishment in the USSR. So enginners and managers were constantly being watched (and threatened). That probably did a lot tokill initiative! Think about it…a bright engineer invents a new process (that saves a huge amount of raw materials). he goes to the plant manager…who is scared to death! If he adopts the new process, the KGB will soon be asking him: “Comrade manager, why have you been wasting the Motherland’s precious resources?” “I think you need to tell us what you’ve been doing with all that aluminum you’ve been staeling!”
So, why would you dare change anything? All you could expect would be a one-way ticket to Siberia (best case) or a bullet in the head!
Actually, if you’ll examine the two weapons, you’ll see that he did something quite different from the StG-44, rather than improving upon it. It’d be like saying a '57 Chevy was a copy of the '38 2-door Ford Coupe. Both will get you where you’re going, but they’re quite different.
That’s no joke. Stalin and his succesors had spies everywhere. If there was the slightest hint that you were guilty of anything, you could be shipped off to the gulag. In fact, according to Solzhenitsyn (and I believe him) there was essentially a schedule the internal police followed: a quota of people sent to the camps.
When Stalin once decided that he needed scapegoats to explain why the Soviet Union was poor and hungry and backward (and of course saying so was counter-revolutionary) he strung up many of the nation’s brightest and best engineers and scientists, most of whom had just been trying to keep the idiot Comunists from obliterating the nation’s waterworks, electric plants, heavy industry, etc. These people’s get you for everything and anything. Capital improvements? Wasting the resources of Russia on frivolous and useless things! Not making capital improvements? Treasonous wrecking!
Fortunately, many of them wound up being reinstated in quasi-prison science camps: essentially scientific/engineering projects where the thinkers had been sentenced. The Soviets found that just a few years after taking all of these people out, they desperately needed actual intelligent, educated men to do all that hard brainwork the Party Congress had ordained by law would be done by the “working class collectively”. :rolleyes:
And it didn’t help that moronic party hacks like Lysenko wre running the show.
Didn’t some similar reaming of intellectuals and scientists happen during China’s “Cultural Revolution” (or maybe it was the “Great Leap Forward”)?* I even seem to remember the control of a Chinese nuclear research facility being seized by one of Mao’s crony’s so it could be “run by the people,” or something stupid like that. (Maybe they wanted to show those elitist physicists how a real comrade runs a cyclotron.)
*Aside from the rest of the bungling, I mean.
The Tupolev Design Bureau had in fact been one of those sharaga engineering prison camps during the war, and the memory no doubt made them all usefully nervous about Beria’s attentions on the Tu-4 program. Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle was set in a similar sharaga, and is a fine read.
The project may have delayed the development of a strategic jet bomber, sure, but that didn’t make it a bad decision. The fast-copy approach meant that, just as Stalin got the A-bomb, he got a plane that could drop it anywhere he’d want it to, and most importantly the West knew it. It is not at all clear that going with an indigenous design would have provided him the deterrent he wanted as early as 1947. The USSR was well behind on heavy bomber development as it was, and they’d have been taking a large number of engineering leaps.
Copying a Fiat design might have been their biggest mistake of all. 
Fiat, as part of the deal, used low-quality Russian steel in their own cars, making Fiat ownership a race between breakdown and rust-out.
Ever wonder why a Russian city is named Togliatti, btw? That’s where they built the factory, and as a salute to Italy’s Communist Party named it after their founder.
This thread reminded me, what will the Russians be able to do with the parts from the F117 stealth bomber that crashed in Serbia? According to this site they have them - why would we allow them to steal US property?
From what I remember, the Russains (or East Germans at least) had captured BMW factories in the east of the country and reproduced cars and maybe motorbikes after the war, even if they were nothing like the cars BMW later produced in the 1960s and 1970s.
The LADAs were Fiats becuase the Italians built some car plants in Russia in exchange for a lot of steel. This may be the reason why (or an urban legend) Italian cars gained such a reputation for rusting quite rapidly in the 60s and 70s.
What would be the basis of demanding it back, given our propensity for actually offering rewards for their pilots to bring us fully functioning MiGs and assorted equipment?
When their pilots brought their planes to Korea or Taiwan (our allies) the planes were shipped to the U.S. When our plane was lost over the land of their ally (while engaged in activity that they considered extra-legal), the plane was shipped to Russia.
I’m sure we have probably lodged all the appropriate protests through diplomatic channels, but we have no belief that we will ever see it, again (unless it is returned after it has been thoroughly examined).
I think it has far more to do with poor corrosion features in the car such as phosphate undercoats and quality primers than the quality of Russian steel. Keep in mind that Italy has a pretty dry climate so corrision is much less of a concern than say, Germany or the rust belt of the US. US manufacturers have made plenty of rust buggies and no one has blamed low quality steel.