A little personal anecdote confirming this reputation: a friend of mine who’s an outdoor guy, especially fishing, used to swear by the most successful Soviet car, the Lada Niva. They were simple and offered no luxury, but were very reliable, and in case of a defect, you could fix everything with “a hammer and a screwdriver” according to my friend.
I think that is true, specifically solid fuel rockets were developed by the soviets before the US. It was a temporary lead, but they were ahead briefly.
And yet the USA rapidly deployed the Minuteman solid-fueled ICBM, while the USSR continued to rely on liquid hypergolic fuels into the 1980s. My understanding is that the large diameter solid rocket motors used by ICBMs require an almost insane degree of quality control to work right; something the Soviets always had trouble with.
The story of Carl Zeiss and what happened at the end of WW2 is quite sad.
The main part of the company was on the wrong side of the divide and ended in Soviet hands. A lot of the production capability was trucked off into Russia, along with some scientists and technicians. But the remnants of the company still operated, and made high quality optics right through the Soviet era. The residual western part of the company, which was created out of what could be saved by the allies before Soviet occupation, also continued. After German reunification Zeiss was reunified. One of the things that was permanently lost was the legacy of employee stakehold in the company. Zeiss is now a dominant powerhouse of high end through to science fiction levels of optical technology.
As to tanks:
Yet again quoting (or at least trying to remember) an anecdote from RV Jones’ Most Secret War.
At the end of the war there was occasion for inspection of Soviet tanks and to compare them to the German tanks. The Soviet tanks looked like junk. Whereas the German ones looked beautifully constructed. Then it was pointed out that the Soviet tanks had precision machined parts and surfaces only where needed, and where not, were left with unfinished parts and surfaces of agricultural quality. This was considered an example of a German attitudes of quality versus pragmatism. One that mattered.
The space race was interesting. There usual story is that the Soviet nuclear weapons were physically larger, and that drove the need for larger rockets to lift them. Yielding a lead in non military space uses. There was the joke in the early space race as the US pulled ahead that “our Germans are better than their Germans”. Which does the local engineers and scientists a significant disservice. None the less, the story of von Braun pulling together as many of his fellow scientists and their families, sneaking past their SS guards, and fleeing Penemunde and heading directly towards the advancing US forces, with the clear intent of choosing his next masters. This probably made a pivotal difference.
Russia has long had a strong culture of science, education and the arts. They just seem beset by centuries of corrupt and incompetent rulers. Right now they are in the middle of being visited by the curse of oil. Overall this is really sad.
Technology needs the support infrastructure to flourish. It isn’t enough to have great individual scientists and engineers.
Indeed, the Russians went from rulers that barely seemed to care if the country was industrialized at all (barring supplying the army with artillery and the navy with dreadnoughts) to rulers that wanted the country industrialized yesterday and so mandated the most incompetent industrialization program imaginable.
One interesting one is the Mig 25 Foxbat. It was genuinely ahead of the US, and was the faster military aircraft of its day. But the US intelligence agencies got wind of its development and thought it was something light-years ahead the US, a mach 3 titanium supersonic fighter. It triggered a massive panicked effort in the US to try and rival the Foxbat (as they imagined it) which ended up as the F15.
But the Foxbat was none of those things it wasn’t titanium and wasn’t a fighter, it was unmanuvarable interceptor specifically designed to shoot down supersonic nuclear bombers and nothing else. Ironically those American supersonic bombers it was designed to shoot down were themselves a figment of Soviet imagination and never actually saw service.
They were known for innovations in surveillance technology, such as “the Thing”.
We’ve apparently never fully figured out all the ways they bugged the US embassy in Moscow.
The Americans never figured out how the Russian system was supposed to work, since they only imagined the Soviets placing microphones in bricks, as they had done themselves. Instead, X-ray crews and other investigators were never able to identify exactly where the bugs were or how they worked. Many theories abounded, but none were proved. Today, the embassy that was built in Moscow is used as an offsite extension of the current embassy, but was never usable as a fully functioning embassy due to the security risk.
Wasn’t the B1 a supersonic nuclear bomber?
Though that was decades later. The Mig 25 was designed to shoot down the XB 70 which never entered service…
It was. The Foxbat was built to intercept the XB-70 Valkyrie (Mach 3+ supercruise) which would have been much more performant than the B1 (high subsonic cruise, Mach 1+ sprint to the target). But the Valkyrie never materialized as a deployable system.
Since Foxbat was built to target a high-altitude bomber, its radar was insufficient to track the lower-flying B1. It also had a shorter operational range and couldn’t operate autonomously at longer range, so couldn’t intercept the B1 over the expected polar trajectories. That’s why the MiG-31 Foxhound needed to be built as a counter, it had everything needed to intercept the B1.
Foxbat did end up serving the high-speed, high-altitude recon mission fairly well AIUI. Just not as the interceptor that it was intended to be. Ironically this is the same development trajectory that the SR-71 Blackbird took. Intended as an interceptor, relegated to recon.
All of that is true. In addition, the Mig-25 could only safely get up to Mach 2.8. It could reach Mach 3.2 but only for 90-120 seconds before the engine overheated and started melting the airplane. Even then, after landing, the plane would require extensive maintenance, and the engines would have to be replaced. Soviet pilots were only allowed to go over Mach 2.8 in an absolute war emergency.
The Soviets designed the Foxbat that way because it was designed to counter the B-70 Valkyrie bomber that the USA was developing at the time. It was supposed to be a Mach 3.0 nuclear bomber that ended up getting cut because it was so expensive.
Expense rarely deterred the Pentagon. What really undid the Valkyrie was that fast as it was it still couldn’t outrun a Surface-to-Air Missile, which made attacking from high altitude no longer a defense.
Cruel the program may have been but it got Russia from a backwards country to being the first to put a person in space (with the small inconvenient of taking the brunt of Germany’s aggression in WWII in the meantime) so it doesn’t look so incompetent to me.
Efficient it wasn’t, effective? seems so.
NVM