That “bug” was “The Thing”, invented by Leon Theremin, the same guy who invented the electronic musical instrument named after him.
“The Thing” was an utterly brilliant device, with no battery of its own – a passive device that some see as the precursor to RFID technology. It was installed in 1945 (!):
Wasn’t there a major scandal in the 1970s? it was found that the Soviets were bombarding the US embassy in Moscow, with microwave radiation? Supposedly, bugs were embedded in the walls, and would modulate the microwaves so that information could be carried in the reflected waves. was this true?
An FPGA defect model would have to deal with both hits on gates and also hits on the underlying memory which defines the FPGA. I’d guess off the top of my head that this is more susceptible. Plus, there are lots of methods of reconfiguring FPGAs to work around defective logic blocks.
For the general industry yields on chips with ternary gates (not FPGAs) would be an issue, but for probes and defense they make lots of chips and use very few, so they have a very different model.
To get back to Russia, as I said the claim of increased accuracy is incorrect - and for that application ternary gates were overkill. There were a lot of interesting dead ends back then, the IBM1620 looked like a decimal machine at the instruction set level.
The Kalashnikov isn’t a copy of the Stg 44. Mechanically, they are not particularly similar. Stg 44 uses a tilting bolt, AK uses a rotating bolt, for example. They are similar only in concept: select fire intermediate cartridge rifles.
The Russians had been experimenting with intermediate cartridge rifles as early as 1915. Other militaries tinkered with the idea during the inter-war years as well. The US, for example, fielded the .30 carbine as a result of wanting something with more power than a pistol or smg but without a rifle’s recoil. The Germans were the first to field what we might consider a “true assault rifle” in numbers and prove the concept but they didn’t come up with the idea and nobody could really be said to have copied them.
Two stories:
East Germany made the best Duraplast car in the world. 
The Czechs brewed top-notch beer at the time. So did other places, outside of the US (we have since caught up).
Your first cite is the very one I posted just before ralph’s, which he was responding to.
It’s part of the Great Circle of Dope.
Supercavitating torpedoes
Also, “modern control theory” was a Russion invention. Russion mathematicians continued to be very good, and seem to have had a much better grasp of “modern control theory” at least up through the 1950’s. I think that Americans only really picked it up for use in the space program.
Related, and touched on, and maybe of interest as a tangent:
Recently I saw in [another Internet forum] a question/statement about the level of mathematics Soviet colleges (not graduate) being far more advanced from the get-go (difficult, etc.) than those in the US.
Anyone encountered that?
I have a spouse and a number of friends who grew up in the USSR and went through their educational system and have degrees. They are from several different countries including Russia itself. From talks with them, they don’t seem to have been exposed to math any more complicated than I took in pursuit of my own degree. They had a few semesters of calculus and statistics, typically. Interestingly, none of them have much that is good to say about their college days. The consensus is that they spent way too much time on Marxist-Leninist theory rather than what they should have been learning.
Actually, this one is.
Ya, I could have done that better. Anyhoo, the first link touches on a 1945 gift to the US Ambassador containing a theremin bug. The second link refers to a $30 million US embassy construction project during the 1980s which was halted when it was discovered that there were too many listening devices in the walls to remove. The technology had advanced a little: steel reinforcing rods were used as antennas. Discovered in 1982, former CIA chief and Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger said, “We do not yet understand the technology nor the strategy”, of all of the equipment. So I guess the KGB had competitive spy capacities.
A week ago I took a look at Soviet exports at the time. Lots of raw natural resources. That they didn’t have a single niche consumer or intermediate product that had any degree of success in the West is kind of pathetic. They could only compete against the Western military, which is another central planning system. (I pose a friendly challenge to my fellow Dopers to prove me wrong: kudos extended now.)
Ok, ok: the Matryoshka dolls are kind of awesome. Fully competitive with the West. Also fur hats.
Russian technology in WWII was even more basic-stuff like army clothing. While the Germans had their elaborate dress uniforms (which were useless in the winter), the Russian soldiers were equipped with padded insulated jackets and pants…with oversized felt boots which were packed with straw and rags. Not to nice, but the troops stayed warm and could fight in the bitter cold. The Germans had lousy winter gear-and paid a terrible price.
I don’t know if the problem with German winter gear was so much that it was lousy as that they neglected to bring any because Hitler said they’d win by fall.
True…you see pictures of the German troops in December 1941-many wrapped rags around their boots and wore captured bits of Russian clothing. Many froze to death because of Hitler’s hubris.
FWIW:
Looking up the Theremin listening device got me to this timeline of Russian invention
One of the items that interested me was Staged combustion cycle made it into the Space shuttle and Atlas rockets.
Yeah, it’s not so much that Germany hadn’t gone down the Warm Clothing branch of the tech tree yet ; and more that the crazies up top had circle-jerked themselves into a hard certitude that the USSR would fall in five minutes, tops.
The basic degree for a lot of people was an engineering degree. Like our liberal arts degree. Taxi driver? Engineering degree. Waitress? Engineering degree. The ordinary level of these ordinary degrees was not exceptional.
[Did I mention I’m posting this from Paris?]
Interesting. At a Polish diner by me in NYC, I said good morning in Polish (of my three memorized sentences) to a waitress, who said, basically, “I’m no fucking Pole, I’m a Russian.” Anyway, she then said she shouldn’t even be doing this shit (waitressing) because she was “a mechanical engineer.” The word “AutoCAD” was unfamiliar to her however, which made me wonder.