In Red Nightmare, a classic propaganda short narrated by Jack Webb, a man wakes up to learn that his typical American town has, Invasion of The Body Snatchers–style, suddenly turned Commie.
The local church or synagogue of his choice is now a museum where exhibits claim that the telephone and other American inventions were actually first developed in Russia. I often heard when I was young that The Soviet Union habitually told lies of this sort. It was a subject of continual jokes. For instance, there is one about it in the movie Lil’ Abner. In what seems like an allusion to this sort of behavior, in the novel 1984 The State makes the same sort of claims for itself, teaching schoolchildren that there were no airplanes or trains before the revolution.
So: did The Soviet Union habitually claim to have invented everything? If so, did it ever drop this practice?
The Soviets tended to find Russian inventors for things…according to them, a Russian invented the first radio, the first telegraph, the first hot air balloon, the first airplane, the first light bulb, the first steam engine, etc. This started in the '40s, when the Soviet Union tried to promote Russian nationalism and patriotism, and continued up until the '80s.
If you want another example in fiction, Star Trek’s Ensign Chekov claimed that Russians invented scotch, karate, the story Cinderella, and more.
It’s not unique to the USSR. Every country, including the U.S., likes to claim that it did things first, and that especially means inventions.
The grade school notion of “an” inventor for a technology is itself silly propaganda. The light bulb was invented many times, in many ways, by many people, in many countries. So was the automobile. You can find whole books arguing about the competing claims about inventions like the airplane or the computer.
I’m sure Stalin institutionalized this process. But he came very late to the game. It’s still going on. Just ask Americans who invented various things. Don’t be surprised if most of the answers turn out to be Americans.
While granting that it occurs all over, the Russian practice was so egregious that it invariably became a joke. On Star Trek they apparently went out of their way to have Chekhov come up with these.
One of the more interesting examples was in one of Alistair Cooke’s 1950s Letters from America entitled “Beizball”, talking about a Russian claimj that they invented the game of baseball. It looks as if the material is included in his book Fun and Games with Alistar Cooke, chapter 6:
I visited Iran back in 2004, and heard a lot of stories like these. Refrigeration? Iranian. Human rights? Iranian. Dualism? Iranian. Goethe? (Honorary) Iranian. Harry Potter? Iranian. Tom & Jerry? Iranian. Yes - these are all actual examples that I heard.
It became a joke in America, even finding its way onto the normally very internationalist Star Trek, not because Russian practice in this regard was particularly egregious, but because, as the OP points out, saying that the Russians did this, and mocking it, was an aspect of American anti-Soviet, anti-Communist propaganda.
Nobody in the thread has yet provided a shred of evidence that the Russians, in Soviet times, indulged in this practice of claiming inventions to an unusually egregious extent. All of it is from American representations of Russians. It seems unlikely to me, i n fact, that the Soviet government would actually have been particularly given to this practice. The Soviet, Communist government rested its claims to legitimacy on the fact that it was modernizing Russia, bringing it out of the backward state that it has been kept in under the oppressive rule of the Tsars. There would thus have been little or no positive propaganda value, if anything, the reverse, for Communists in pushing the idea that pre-Communist Russia was a hotbed of technological creativity.
It is true that Stalin, in particular, was not above using Russian nationalism as well as Marxist ideology to justify his rule, but that was a matter of exploiting pre-existing nationalistic prejudices that, though they certainly existed in Russia, were probably no greater than those found in other countries (certainly including the USA), were actually in conflict with the inherent internationalism of Marxism. (Which is why not only Western propagandists, but also left-wing critics of Stalinism, such as Trotsky and George Orwell, stigmatized Stalin’s exploitation of Russian nationalism as hypocritical.)
And I have heard Americans claim that Sally Ride was the first woman in space. Well, only 20 years late!.
Of course, although they Soviets did not land any people on the moon, they did put the first people into space, and were the first to “land” an Earth vehicle on the Moon.
I graduated from high school in Russia, in 1979. We were taught that Yablochkov invented the light bulb, Popov invented radio, Mozhaiski invented the heavier-than-light plane and Polzunov invented the steam engine. etc. etc. Yes, it was official Soviet line on these and other inventions.
In “1984” Winston Smith notes that Oceania claims that various inventions were invented by the Party, and expects that as time goes by, more and more inventions will be credited to the Party (see 1984 - George Orwell - Google Books)
Yes and no. No propagandist is ever going to let a little thing like consistency keep them from bragging rights.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, one of the great pioneering theorists of rocketry, did his most influential work in the Tsarist age, but that never stopped Russia from declaring him the father of rocketry. That was certainly true in the 1950s as the space programs drew headlines.
Just as importantly, it was true even earlier, when Tsiolkovsky found himself feted in all the official newspapers in 1932, on the occasion of his 75th birthday. (We forget how much obsession there was with rocketry in the 1930s, especially in Europe.)
I don’t have quick cites to hand, but my impression is that it’s related to what’s being said inthis thread. Russia’s claim to being an equal superpower to the U.S. was helped by its claims to technological prowess, both military might and the industrial help it promised emerging nations. Part of that lay in the intangibles of its boasts of having done everything first, i.e. without help from America or Europe.
Was this exaggerated and made fun of by Americans? No doubt. But I think the jokes were based on a very large grain of truth. Maybe a boulder of truth.
The good thing is that where it counted, Russian schooling did not fudge. Boyle-Mariotte’s law was named correctly. Michaelson-Morley experiment was attributed correctly. Maxwell’s equations were Maxwell’s not some Russian name’s. etc.
Actually, if they taught you that, they were certainly doing better than they would in the US – outside of France, people tend to leave Mariotte out of the Boyle-Nariotte Law. I only know about thsat myself because I’ve been researching Mariotte recently. I was brung up on Boyle’s law.
<Russian accent>Maxwell is poor transliteration of “Maksimov”, good Russian name. He was from Vladivostok. Good Russian scientist, student of Heinrich Lenz at St. Petersburg. Very famous. England stole his name and his discoveries.</Russian accent>
