It is pretty much a given that the West did most things better than the USSR, but were there areas, or technologies where the Soviet Union was ahead?
Early Space tech, especially the Rocket Engines were well ahead of the West for time. Also landing a probe on Venus in the 70s was pretty amazing.
I understand the AK-47 was superior to the early M-16 rifles.
One more, they were well ahead of the US in Vodka making until at least the late 1960s.
I know a bit about this with regard to aircraft.
It may be better to rephrase the question a little, because it wasn’t that the Soviets made “better” aircraft than we did. They made them very differently than we would have because they had very different needs.
Take the Korean War era MiG-15 fighter and its American counterpart, the F-86 Sabre. The Sabre had hydraulically boosted flight controls and several other bells and whistles, while the MiG was very bare bones. The MiG’s stick was very high in the cockpit to give the pilot better leverage because there were no hydraulics. Why? Because hydraulic fluid freezes in places like Siberia. It was built simply and rugged for that reason, and because it was likely to be serviced by barely literate conscripts.
The American military by contrast, could assume well trained ground personnel would be working on the F-86. And because cost was less of an issue, they could build it with more “stuff”. We would never have built a plane like the Soviets built MiGs, but they were both very good airplanes, with comparable performance, well designed for where they came from and how they would be used.
I’ve been around these types a little, and the people who have operated both will tell you the MiG-15 was much simpler to operate and maintain. I think a good comparison is the AK-47 vs. the M-16. The AK was built simply and was rugged as hell. While the M-16 was fancier and bit more complex. The MiG-15 was the equivalent of an AK.
This extends to Soviet spacecraft too. The Soyuz currently in use is a direct descendant of the same spacecraft that was flying in the 60s. Again, we wouldn’t design and build one that way, but it works very well for them.
At some point this breaks down because there certainly were some Soviet aircraft that were deathtraps. OTOH, we’ve certainly created some planes that were overly complicated and bit too clever for their own good.
Eh, yes and no.
The AK-47 and the M-16 have very different design philosophies. The AK-47 isn’t designed to be all that accurate. It’s intended for regular infantry grunts who are only expected to be effective out to maybe 150 yards or so. The M-16 is designed to be more accurate.
The AK-47 is designed to be made out of cheap parts so that it can be cranked out of factories with limited technology and inexpensive machinery. A lot of the AK-47’s legendary reliability comes from the fact that the parts are intended to be made with much worse manufacturing tolerances than the M-16. Things fit together more loosely, so if some crud gets into the working bits, it’s no biggie. The M-16 is more expensive to produce, requires more expensive tooling, and fouls more easily due to tighter tolerances and therefore less tolerance for dirt and crud.
Is the better weapon the “better” weapon? That’s a real question that doesn’t have an easy answer. There is a definite advantage to being able to make more weapons for the same amount of money. How important is it that the weapon is more accurate if you end up facing twice as many enemy soldiers?
The M-16 also suffered from idiots being in charge. Some idiot decided that they could use cheaper ammo in it, which quickly fouled the weapon and also caused it to cycle faster, resulting in parts breaking due to the extra stress. Worse, some other idiot decided that since they couldn’t field enough cleaning kits, they would just tell the soldiers that they didn’t need to clean their weapons. Plus you had normal teething failures like you always get with a new weapon system, one of which was that they used too weak of a spring in the magazines, resulting in misfeeds and jams.
With all of those issues, the early AK-47 was definitely superior to the M-16.
Whether the AK-47’s design is better is a matter of opinion. The Soviet opinion was that a cheap weapon that is “good enough” but can be produced in much greater quantities is the better weapon. While that can be debated, the fact remains that the AK-47 is the most widely produced weapon in all of history.
Having a somewhat crappy weapon for your standard infantry grunts also isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When you have a group of new soldiers, some will be better than others, whether it’s because of natural talent, or maybe some of them hunted a lot when they were growing up, etc. For those soldiers who demonstrated better skill, the Soviets didn’t cripple them with the crappy AK. Instead, they gave them the SVD, which increased their effective range out to about 600 to 800 yards.
It’s a different philosophy than what we in the U.S. have.
I dunno about that… They couldn’t make big rocket engines like the five on the bottom of the Saturn V. Their attempt at a moon rocket, the N1, had dozens of small engines.
This is the same technique that SpaceX is now using, but it requires very sophisticated controls for those engines. SpaceX has it, but the Soviets didn’t. Which is why the N1 went boom really bigly.
I think that most of the USSR’s early successes in spaceflight were mostly due to being willing to tolerate a greater degree of risk than the US.
Pretty much every Soviet tank in WWII was better - often far better - than its German counterpart (if there even was one). “Better” here meaning more reliable, better armed and armoured, and generally more suited to the battlefields in western Russia (for instance much wider tracks to cope with the poor roads, and mud).
What evened the odds was Soviet command and tactical ineptitude and paranoia. For instance, in the early part of the way they’d only trust the command tank with a radio, the others in the squadron just followed it blindly. The Germans quickly learned to take out the only tank with a radio aerial, rendering the others operationally useless and able to be picked off at leisure.
I think USSR optics (microscopes, telescopes, binoculars) are considered as being especially high quality. I remember lots of Soviet optical instruments being sold in thd US in thd early 1990s cheap that were considered to be great deals.
The USSR’s early successes in spaceflight were almost entirely due to the R-7 rocket. An absolute dinosaur of an ICBM, when the USA was working to produce the smallest lightest rockets it could like the Thor and the Atlas, the R-7 had the sheer throw weight to carry significant payloads to orbit while the USA was stuck trying to launch microsats like Vanguard and Explorer.
I remember my Optics Professor getting very excited in the early 90s as loads of East German Zeiss lenses were flooding the market. He claimed that they were way better than the ones produced by the West German Zeiss company.
They were well ahead of the West in researching phage therapy, which was shunned in the West largely because of its Soviet association.
Vacuum tubes.
It partially was because they were behind on fabbing silicon transistors, partially for the military, they were more resistant to EMP. Even today, if you prefer a tube amplifier over solid-state, it will likely have Russian tubes in them.
This. Carl Zeiss Jena produced not only top notch consumer optics, but also high tech optics for aerial surveillance for satellites and other space exploration. They had the reputation of being the best of the world in their field in the 70s and 80s.
I have to wonder about optics… The thing with optics is, there’s a theoretical maximum to how good a lens or mirror even can be, and that theoretical maximum is actually achievable. Any reputable optics-maker will sell diffraction-limited optics. There are other ways they could be better (like coatings or filters for various purposes, size, or price), but in terms of pure optical quality, it should be an n-way tie for first.
I have a dim memory about it being related to sand. There was a certain very fine (river?) sand that they used to polish the lenses that was only found in East Germany.
The MiG 29 was definitely top shelf.
I don’t believe it was better than the F-15 or F-16, maybe it was on par? I feel like the electronics of the US fighters put them as the better.
The entire rail sector.
The USSR had a massive rail network that transported an enormous amount of goods and comfortable passenger sleeper trains renowned for being on time.
If you were an infantryman in Vietnam it would’ve seemed like that, but what happened was an ill-considered decision by the Army Ordnance Corps to change to a different propellant than what was tested, for various reasons related to specs and availability. Moreover the system wasn’t adequately tested in prolonged tropical humidity at all. So the whole system went to the field in an untested configuration that performed poorly.
Both the AK-47 and original M16 were marginal rifles, and the powder substitution turned the M16 into an inferior rifle due to fouling, jamming, and degraded cyclic rate of fire. These issues were resolved in later models, but they caused a lot of needless American deaths, which makes the bad reputation very sticky.
From what I’ve read, Soviet design and production had a certain element of it being rugged and easily maintained… only for so long.
The thinking was that say… an aircraft would last and be field maintainable for only a certain period before a comprehensive overhaul was required or the aircraft is destroyed. That’s largely why they didn’t push their equipment hard in peacetime. They essentially traded long term maintainability for larger numbers and short term durability.
This is in contrast to the Western approach, which was/is for the equipment to be able to be extensively used and maintained indefinitely, like an airliner or something. Which is why Western forces were able and willing to have a rigorous training schedule in peacetime western pilots typically got more than twice the annual flight hours of their Soviet contemporaries.
With the rifles, it sounds like the M16 was better under good conditions, but the AK47 was better under poor conditions. But what you want is the rifle that will be good under war conditions, and war conditions are usually poor. So I think I’d have to say that the Soviet approach there was actually better.