Certainly Russians have contributed their share, Igor Sikorsky comes immediately to mind, but what about the Soviet era? Did the Soviets contribute anything to the advancement of civilization or were their finest minds too busy reverse engineering pirated Western technology?
Well, Sputnik was quite an achievement.
So was Tetris.
Didn’t Russian doctors pioneer the use of Phage viruses to fight bacterial infections.
or something
IIRC the Russians did some interesting, ground breaking stuff in design and materials, but it was mainly military related (esp subs and aircraft) and wasn’t readily transferable to non-miltary uses and also didn’t (obviously) get much press. They also did some interesting stuff with Tokomak style fusion research even though the design didn’t prove out.
I thought it was absurd that the Reagan white house was making such a big deal about Russian work on particle accelerators at the height of SDI debate , when their stuff was published in the open literature. They ceertainly did make contributions.
Along the same lines, the original papers on EM analysis for Stealth design were Russian. According to the book Skunk Works, the author was later invited to see the American stuff built based upon his papers. Crazy world.
I agree–they pretty well mopped up in the space race. We won out on the moon, and they admittedly had some nasty casualties on their side. But they got to space first with a satellite, dog, man, and woman; and Mir broke seventeen different kinds of records. The Russians’ current rocket engines (a result of Soviet work) are still considered to be better than anyone else’s in the world.
More seriously, the Soviets first invented the tokamak reactior, which will probably make fusion energy possible (and, as a side benefit to this discovered a lot about high energy plasma). Scientists in the Soviet Union also first studied Cherenkov radiation, and did groundbreaking work on superconductivity as well as quantum physics.
Soviets won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1958, 1962, 1964, and 1978, and the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1956.
According to a report today on Morning Edition, the Soviets (with the help of their ex-Nazi scientists, naturally), perfected the gas centrifuge method of uranium enrichment. Prior to that, the United States was using the gaseous diffusion method.
I thought people were looking into that in the 1800s and quit when people started discovering vaccines. So the Russians didn’t invent it but they probably did some work with it.
Perhaps not the ‘tech’ you’re looking for, but post-revolution, Soviet Russia came up with a lot of what we consider standard movie-making techniques. For instance, the idea of a film montage was created by a russian film-maker (and has kind-of a fun story behind it).
- Apollo 1
- Challenger
- Columbia
- Skylab
People like to make jokes about how Mir was a piece of junk, but it lasted many years longer than our aborted attempt did.
When the American shuttle fleet was grounded, the US resoted to using Russian space capsules to get people and cargo “upstairs”.
As far as I’m concerned, the Soviets/Russians had and have a far better record in space flight than the US does. If the country weren’t so poor now, they’d give us a run for our money.
And don’t forget the KGB’s pioneering work in photo manipulation. 
Better as in they were able to kill a far greater number of people than the US in their attempts? Better in the fact that no Soviet has ever set foot on any body other than Earth? They had some shining moments, but taken as a whole, I don’t think their space program was better by a long shot.
Skylab was not intended to last. It was supposed to last longer than it did, yes, but it still served its purpose. The Soviets also lost people on reentry and on the pad, and while I can’t recall any Soviets dying on takeoff they had a much higher failure rate than we did.
Mir was a nice accomplishment, but toward the end it was being held together with baling wire and prayer. It was long past obsolete when it finally died. The Soviets and then the Russians in turn kept it up for prestige purposes.
That’s because in our infinite wisdom we got rid of most of our heavy-lifting capabilities and put all our eggs into one basket with the Shuttle. In that respect the Russians were “smarter”, although how much of that was due to the fact that they couldn’t afford to keep up the Buran is debateable.
From Commie Atheists?
That was from " Battleship Potemkin" wasn’t it? I also forgot about Sputnik since NASA very quickly eclipsed the Soviet space program. I suppose one could also include their technique for embalming dead communist leaders. Apparently Kim Il Sung got the Lenin treatment.
This is what I was going to mention. They were providing historical background for the current controversies about Iran and North Korea pursuing nuclear power. Listen to it here.
They were pioneers in bringing dead dogs back to life.
In Soviet Russia, Science researches you!
According to Yakov Smirnov, 2-way televisions.