They were back to being Russian of various faiths by then.
Their space program was very good. It has often been discussed that the Soviets were not worried about moonwalks but had hopes of an orbital weopons platform. Reagan co-opted this and scared the shit out of them very badly from what I have read.
Didn’t the Ruskies do some of the early work in Laser eye surgery? I can’t prove that, but do know a friend of mine’s father, who was one of the first to do it the US, went to Russia for a couple months to confer with their surgeons.
IIRC, much of the discovery of radial keratomy work was largely accident. Some kid in Russia was in an auto accident and tiny glass shards sliced his eye in a rough, but workable radial pattern. His eyesight then improved noticably, and Russian scientists started looking into how it happened.
I recall seeing pictures of RK patients being worked on in assembly-line fashion. Sounds like a joke about socialist medicine, but I had no doubts it was real when I saw it.
Not quite - though I can see how one might get this impression from Richard Rhodes’s discussion of the point in Dark Sun (Simon&Schuster, 1995, esp. p71-2). David Holloway, in particular, suggests a rather different emphasis in his somewhat more detailed account of the matter in Stalin and the Bomb (Yale, 1994).
Both point to Kurchatov’s 7/3/43 memo as the key distillation and assessment of what was known to the Soviets on the subject from intelligence reports. Most of the material in this derived from British sources, at a time when the US wasn’t sharing its nuclear research with London. So Kurchatov’s recommendation at this point to prefer centifuges to gaseous diffusion was actually him disputing the British conclusion at the time. Rhodes then infers that this recommendation stood until well after the end of the war, with the Soviets concentrating on centrifuges.
However, the intelligence picture changed towards the end of the same year, not least because, once transatlantic cooperation started, one of the Tube Alloys scientists sent to the US was Klaus Fuchs. From December 1943 he was privy to the US progress on gaseous diffusion and at some point in 1944 transmitted this information to Moscow. Holloway suggests that it’s at this point that the Soviets had to reassess Kurchatov’s recommendation.
At this stage the Soviet research on all methods of isotope separation was still experimental, with no decision as to what plants would be built. Come the end of the war, their bomb project immediately moved into a higher gear and - no doubt influenced by what the US had done - they invested heavily in trying out electromagnetic, gaseous and thermal methods. The last was quickly dropped and they started building industrial scaled electromagnetic and gaseous diffusion plants in early 1946. By early 1951, the latter had come to dominate.
By contrast, their centrifuge research was also well funded in the same period, but of no major significance. (There was a 1950 proposal to build a small plant to supplement gaseous diffusion, but that was never built.) It’s only in the 1950s that their investment in the likes of Konrad Zippe, who’d been brought from Germany at the end of the war, began to pay off. Only after these innovative improvements in the technology did they switch to centrifuges as the prefered method.
Holloway even suggested that the Soviets would have been better off concentrating on centrifuges in 1945, given that that eventually became the best solution. But, if nothing else, that’s with the benefit of hindsight.
The Russkis landed a probe on Venus. Venus! That’s impressive.
Yeah, they even sent back pictures of the surface. The pics on those pages of Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ fascinated me endlessly as a child.
OK - I’d not heard of this. Can anyone provide a link to those pictures ? I’d really like to see them.
Here’s some, maybe even all of them, in this BBC news article.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3387895.stm
I don’t recall there being many pics.
Eh, screw those pics, check this out:
http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_DigitalImages.htm
These are actually the reworked pics that the article was about.
Wow. That’s great stuff! Thanks, Revtim!
My pleasure.
It is that; not only the pictures but the other information about early Soviet interplanetary probes. We may have trumped the “missile gap”, but it took a couple of decades before we had technical parity with the Soviets in planetary exploration.
Fascinating site; thanks for wrecking my planned morning work. 
Stranger
Really neat Conference Abstract (Session VI) that takes up the OP re Info Retrevial and dissemination in Sci and Technical areas.
Two things to note:
A.
*… but by the mid-1960s the system counted 2,500 member organs, and by the mid-1970s 11,500. In the opinion of many foreign observers – including Americans – the Soviet system at that time operated at a high level and was a factor in the success of many Soviet areas of development, notably the space program and the aviation and armaments industries. *
B.
The Soviet Union spent ten times less annually on scientific and technical information support activities than the US, even though the number of specialists working in the field were almost the same. The result was that ultimately only about half of Soviet scientific workers got access to a quarter of the world’s scientific and technical results – and then only two years after they were published. By contrast, in the US 90% of all published material became universally accessible almost immediately upon publication
The mighty Saturn V’s are the only rocket to put a man on the moon.
But yes the USSR does have some great space tech.
Also they might have been able to make ‘beyond stealth’ planes using plasma shields and supersonic torpedos.
I don’t have a cite for it, now, but my understanding is that in the field of pure mathematics the Soviets had a lot of work to their credit, too. At the time I had been hearing this (mid-to-late 80’s) there was a lot of sour grapes about how they had to be good at that, since they couldn’t just get a computer to crunch things out for them.
And, while I don’t particularly agree that the Soviet/Russian space program is better than [del]NADA[/del] -er- NASA’s, I do agree they have had some spectacular successes.
It seem the soviets can be credited with the Rubiks Cube, and the awesome fighting machine that was Drago in the film Rocky III…also the AK-47 which seems to get used pretty heavily around the world even today.
Hardly. The Rubik’s Cube was the invention of architect Ern? Rubik of Hungary, which was about the least cooperative member of the Warsaw Pact, and during the Kádár era it effectively withdrew at least twice from Pact agreements (albeit with only nominal resistance from the Supreme Soviet and always to return to the fold). Hungary also led the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Stranger