I think we as a country should be willing to learn from other countries. Uncle Joe ran his prison system at a profit to the state. The topic of this thread is, “Did the USSR provide us with any lessons?” Good old Joe taught us how to turn convicts into economic resources.
Since 1980 the prison population has tripled, and the crime rate has declined. Unfortunately, incarceration is expensive in the United States. If we would take a tip from Joe, we could triple the prison population again, while lowering the crime rate and reducing the budget deficit.
Criminals should not be regarded as victims of social and economic injustice. They have done nothing to merit remedial education and job training. They certainly should not spend their days in the prison yard working out with weights. They have debts to pay society.
Why one God’s green Earth would we WANT to triple the prison population again? Should our goal as a decent society not be to keep it as low as possible?
And if remedial education and training helps prevent criminals from re-offending, why would we not want that? Are we so eager to get our pound of flesh in vengeance that we are willing to see our wives and children raped, murdered, assaulted, etc. by unrehabilitated prisoners?
Besides those obvious points, one benefit of the Gulag system was that it made scarce labor available to work in undesirable locales, performing dangerous tasks. We don’t have that kind of labor problem in the West; the market is more than capable of addressing it, whether through wage premiums for dirty work, use of machines or robots, or by bringing in immigrant labor (legal or otherwise).
“The NK-33 and NK-43 rocket engines are the highest performing Liquid Oxygen/ Kerosene ever produced.”[Nk-33 and Nk-43 Rocket Engines - AeroSpaceGuide.net](NK-33 rocket engine) The design is now being marketed by Aerojet.
I’d like to see a cite for that too. And a definition of “profit.”
I don’t know if I really want to try to unpack this, given the risk of derailing the thread. Sticking to the topic, do you feel that treating “criminals,” (i.e. “those who have committed a crime”) as state chattel is a lesson the USSR taught and one that the modern West should adopt?
I too, question this. I really believe that Stalin just wanted people dead, and if they could work a few months while dying, that was all to the good. Take Magada (Siberia)-political prisoners were used to mine gold and uranium-almost nobdy came back alive. The place was so desolate, the guards had nothing to do (escape was almsot impossible-you would die of starvation trying to cross the tundra.
Anyway, I’d say Lysenkoism really was a typical product of the Soviet system. Look at democracy - political ideas competing against each other so the best ones emerge. Or a free market economy - commercial products competed against each other so the best ones emerge. And that’s how science is supposed to work - different theories compete against each other and the best become accepted by the scientific community. The United States and other western societies certainly don’t lack pseudoscientific ideas like Lysenkoism - we just drive them to the fringe because they can’t keep up with the good ideas based on reality.
The Soviet Union, or other totalitarian systems, lacked that competitive mechanism. They held to the principle of Official Truth. There was no political competition, no economic competition, and no scientific competition. Somebody up at the top just made a decision about what the one acceptable truth was and everyone else had to subscribe to that truth.
Lysenkoism could easily have emerged in the United States but it never would have thrived. It would have been tested against rival theories and failed. But in a totalitarian system, Lysenkoism can be enshrined as the Official Truth and then no rival theories are allowed to challenge it.
The same thing happened in Nazi Germany with the rejection of “Jewish physics”. When you have a system where only one idea is allowed, it’s inevitable that some bad ideas will emerge on top.
This thread has officially entered The Twilight Zone.
Do a little googling on “Purges”, “Gulags” and “Kulak relocation”.
And that’s just for the Soviet Union. Since you mentioned the more general ‘communist culture’ above, you can have more fun doing similar things with Maoist China.
Weapons innovation.
a) The T-34 tank has been mentioned - part of its genius was sloped armor, which dissipated some of the force of incoming shells. This was revolutionary in tank design and a shock to the Germans. The attribute was copied by them (the Panther), the Americans (Sheridan), and pretty much everyone else postwar.
b) The AK47 is another example of this - and even to those who say Kalashnikov stole the design from the German MP44, their gun was typically Germanically complicated & not easy to mass-produce or fix. The AK47 is. Kalashnikov said his secret was loose tolerances - he didn’t try to seat the firing pin exactly in the slide - he left plenty of room for play. Therefore, u can bury an AK in mud and it’ll still shoot.
c)PPsH, the ‘burp gun’ - again, rugged and simple, with a drum clip that can hold 70 bullets. Some historians argue that without it, they Russians would’ve lost Stalingrad. Whether they copied it from the Finnish Suomi or vice versa - much easier to maintain, much more likely to fire in the freezing cold than the complicated German MP40, much more ammo in the big drum - little things like that add up to a big advantage in close combat, such as was in Staingrad.
d) dog bombs. Yeah, it’s cruel, but it worked (mostly). Simply, they trained dogs to crawl under tanks & strapped bombs onto them. Some couldn’t differentiate between Russian & German tanks, but overall, it’s accepted that they destroyed 400 German ones. OK so we don’t go so over-the-top, but the US Navy has trained dolphins to spear enemy frogmen with spikes strapped to their mouths. Not exactly safe recreation for them.
Abiotic theory of oil. Unlike the rest of the world, the Russians are solidly backing geologist Thomas Gold’s theory that oil is not dinosaur sauce, but rather natural Earth juice - and thus not in dwindling supply. Test drillings near the Arctic have found a little oil & a lot of natural gas under the sediment layer - which would be impossible if oil & gas came from the dinos.
Holograms - I think they were invented by a Russian chemist.
Internet porn - technically Ukraine is a separate country, but some of the girls were born pre-1990, back when it was all 1 USSR.
Far superior in what sense? By your own admission they were brainwashing centres. How does this make them “more superior” than those in West Germany?
How can we quantify this?
Again, how can we quantify which food was better? It’s not like every food available in West Germany was laced with additives. You could still buy fresh produce from a local market, presumably.
Some of the replies in this thread are beyond bizarre. Taking your post at face value, it appears that the best way to spur creativity in the fashion industry is to outlaw any other material other than Hessian and to cause a gastronomic revolution we need only stamp out competition amongst food suppliers. Talk about rose tinted glasses…
Points to the OP. No one is denying that Stalin and Mao did terrible things. There are plenty of “don’t try this at home” lessons and the ease with which Communist governments become dictatorships is one of them. But if you’re so freaking blind mad with fear and anger at Communist governments that you can’t bear to think about them objectively, you probably should not be reading this thread.
It wasn’t revolutionary, Christie’s M1928 which was the precursor of the BT series which was itself the precursor to the T-34 had sloped armor. Sloped armor also doesn’t dissipate any of the force of an incoming shell; it increases the depth of armor that needs to be penetrated as opposed to an impact at a 90 degree angle and increases the likelihood of a ricochet occurring. What shocked the Germans about the T-34 was the sheer thickness of the armor combined with the size of the gun and impressive cross country speed all in one package, along with the fact that they had no idea that the Soviets had the T-34 and KV series tanks, much less already in volume production and deployed in substantial numbers.
Do you have a cite on it being accepted they destroyed 400 tanks? I’ve only ever heard of them being used experimentally and unsuccessfully; never with them being accredited with destroying close to two panzer division’s worth of tanks.
OK, so Christie’s design was great - no other tank at that time had that kind of sloped armor. Thickness notwithstanding, the overall effect is to dissipate the force of incoming shells (at a 90` angle). Yeah, the Germans were surprised by anything advanced the Russians did or had. The 34 is considered the best tank of ww2 - partly due to the sloped armor.
As far as the dog bombs - it’s too aggravating quoting any authority, since many trolls bitch about any particular website or authority. 1 of their favorite activities is the 1-word reply ‘Cite?’. I saw it on a show on the Military Channel too. U wanna go thru all the sites, google this:
