Soviet Superscience / Real Life

• Soviet Union being a socialist planned economy while the US and most of the western world were capitalist with mostly free markets meant that while western consumer technology was far superior and accessible, in areas that receive government interest such as nuclear, military and space technology the Soviets were quite advanced and surpassed their western rivals. We cannot forget the example of Soviet Superscience that quite possibly defined the latter half of the 20th century: The plutonium-implosion bomb that detonated at 7:00 am on the 29th of August, 1949, at Semipalatinsk in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. The bomb, developed five years quicker than the Anglo-US intelligence services believed possible, turned out to be 50% more destructive than the Soviet scientists had believed possible, as it destroyed one of the most elaborate nuclear test sites (a small mockup city, complete with metro system and a "garrison" of heavy military equipment and animals, was annihilated). Notably, the Soviet science teams made little use of the data they received from the Manhattan Project; their "Prince of Science", Igor Kurchatov, restricted the team to using the US designs only to check their work. The Soviet detonation had many names: RDS-1. Article 501. Joe-1. But it was the name the science teams gave to the test that will live in history: Первая молния, Pervaya molniya — "First Lightning".
  • They would later use than knowledge to create the experimental RDS-220 Czar Bomba, whose explosion over Novaya Zemlya on October 30th 1961 was equivalent to 58 million tonnes of TNT. The Czar Bomba, the most powerful device ever made by man, produced a fireball eight kilometres in diameter, a mushroom cloud over seven times the height of Mount Everest, third-degree burns 70 miles away, a thermal pulse that reached 170 miles from ground zero, and a shockwave that was visible in the air 430 miles away. Villages hundreds of miles from the test site were destroyed, atmospheric focusing shattered windows as far away as Finland and Norway. The shockwave registered on seismographs around the world, even after it had already travelled around the earth three times. If superscience is about producing Awesome, but Impractical generators of superlatives, then the Czar Bomba is surely its peak.
  • The actual equivalent of RDS-220 as designed was supposed to be about 100 megatons. It was lowered on a tested example due to concerns about the extremely dirty fallout from the third stage of fusion device.
  • While gigantic nuclear explosions may be flashy, the actual benefit from running a totalitarian society with no anti-nuclear press allowed the use of smaller controlled nuclear explosions for excavation, oil drilling and sealing of gas well fires. This is a field where the Western powers did not venture after the 1960s.
• It's not only military nuclear power. When the Soviets announced in 1969 that they maintained 10 million kelvin plasma in their T-3 tokamak for 10 milliseconds, the Western scientists were so skeptical (it was about ten times what anyone else managed) that they demanded their own team be allowed to check.
• The date is October 4, 1957. Sitting on the pad is a modified R-7 rocket, the world's first operational ICBM. But on this day, it doesn't carry a warhead — it carries a small metal sphere, about the size of a beach ball, with four whiplike antennae and a radio transmitter. It is known as PS-1 — "Elementary Satellite 1" — by the Russians, and soon, to the rest of the world, it would be known as "Sputnik 1". On that day, the Russians blew the United States out of the water with the massive triumph of the world's first functioning artificial satellite. Anybody who doubted the existence of the Sputnik could simply tune to a certain frequency (a bit higher than 20 MHZ, according to the Russian press) and hear its transmitter's steady beeping signal. Before this, the overwhelming idea of Russia to most Americans was a backwards country that could not compete with the US's might — after this, it suddenly became superior in most Americans' minds, a juggernaut nation that had to be contained at all costs. American politicians gazed up at the small, visible polished sphere passing over their heads and wondered what else the Soviets could carry into space — perhaps nuclear warheads, military spacecraft, or something worse. While it did not return much data itself, being a simple battery transmitter in space, its legacy kickstarted The Space Race, and led to a certain American taking the first steps on the Moon in 1969.
• There was a Soviet attempt to create man-chimpanzee hybrids for use as workers. It didn't work, but explains the weird science aspect they get in fiction. The precise details of that infamous experiment, which is usually considered (understandably) little more than an Urban Legend, is that the Soviet scientist who did it, Ilya Ivanov, worked more or less alone, only got a grant from Stalin due to red tape^note and probably would have been shot if Stalin had discovered what he was actually doing, the experiment consisted of trying to use human sperm to artificially inseminate chimpanzees and orangutans, and his actual goal was to "prove" evolution and use that to stymie the political power of the Russian Orthodox Church, not to make Super Soldiers.
• This is probably based on the phenomenon of the "Russian Woodpecker", an odd low-frequency shortwave signal caused by the over-the-horizon radar system in the Ukraine that irritated European ham radio operators during the '70s and '80s.
• The Soviet Union, apart from creating apemen, was actively working on flying tanks and flying ships built to skim over the surface of the ocean as fast heavy transports that would work below radar.
• The world's only extant modern balanced ternary computer, a design that allows for more efficient handling of many computational algorithms (including basic addition and multiplication), is a Soviet design from the late 50s (Setun). Designs and theories have appeared in the West as well as one of the world's first computing devices, a 19th century wooden calculating machine, but no ternary computers have been actually built outside of the Soviet Union due to general lack of interest and the ubiquity of binary hardware.
• Software development in the 1990s did not fall behind the West, some popular applications become ubiquitous throughout the world.
• In the field of space, there's Polyus (a megawatt-class orbital laser testbed, which fortunately for the West failed on launch) and a ground-mounted laser called Terra-3.
  • The Russians were quite keen on experimenting with space stations in general. Once they lost the Moon race, they aimed for and pretty much achieved many records for longest stays in orbit. Russian space habitation technology is possibly still the best in the world.
  • While the USAAF-CIA MOL space spy outpost never materialized, several of the Soviet stations were purely military installations armed with a 23 mm gun for defensive purposes.
  • Speaking of space stations, one can't forget Mir. Despite the reputation for being an unsafe rust bucket, that was only because it was forced to operate far longer that its original planned operation life due to the fall of the USSR and subsequent space funding limits. Within its original planned lifespan, it was the most sophisticated space station in orbit. In fact, the Russian Orbital Segment, the first Russian-made modules around which the International Space Station was built, was the base configuration of the cancelled Mir-2 program.
• A real-life example of "abandoned Soviet experiment" is the NK-33 closed circuit rocket engine. Originally intended for use in the attempt to get a man on the Moon, the prototypes were supposed to be destroyed once that project was cancelled. Sore losers the Soviets. Fortunately, several NK-33 engines were hidden in a warehouse by their designer, Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kuznetsov. That happened in the 70s. Fast forward to the 90s, when somewhat improved relations between East and West, and presumably some money, helped the old relics emerge from storage, where they proved to be still cutting edge tech despite being two decades old when they were found. The technology behind the NK-33 allows it to be a very efficient engine, and Wikipedia is to be believed, the NK-33 achieves a thrust-to-mass ratio that is among the highest among all currently existing rocket engines, and that is for an engine that is over four decades old.
• Zombie dogs!
  • Also, two-headed dogs!
• A twelve-kilometre-deep hole in the ground. Y'know, For Science!... Or something.
• Real life averted: late-70s tinfoil hatter "Dr." Peter Beter (believe it or not, his real name) entertained many fantasies about Soviet technology, including the existence of "cosmospheres", which were apparently large, blimp-like spacecraft. His, er, theories were carried into the 1990s by noted Usenet kook Robert McElwaine.
• Subversion. A lot of Russia's best technology has never been super-science, but Boring, but Practical. The T-34 tank is considered by some to have been the best of World War II despite inconsistent quality control (some were superb, others were lemons) and maniacal saving on every non-essential part. Also Soviet small arms have long been quite good — they were usually disregarded by non-shooters due to their ugliness, but when it came to reliability, quality of steels and alloys used, rate of fire for automatic weapons and accuracy of rifles, it was a different kettle of fish.
  • On the less bellicose side, Russia makes some pretty good bush planes and similar heavy weather equipment, very strong off-road heavy trucks (inasmuch as one can say there are heavy trucks, very heavy trucks and Russian trucks) and pretty good and reliable if less fanciful watches (they capitalize on simplicity, sturdiness and reliability for medium-priced watches, using dated 21,600 vibration-per-hour calibers, as opposed to modern Swiss 28,800 and 36,000 vph).
  • The Soviet created simplified export variants, or "monkey models", of their military equipment, in part to mislead Western analysis of their capabilities (the simplified versions were intended to be used by the Soviets themselves to replace their losses in a full scale war when the pressure to maintain their combat strength means that they have to cut corners to ensure a ready supply of military equipment, much like the obsessive simplification the T-34 underwent during World War II. They found that they could support their allies, make money on the side, as well as field test their vehicles by exporting these versions). These simplified models typically lacked the more advanced fire control systems and electronics, armor inserts, high performance ammunition, and anti-tank guided missiles of the tanks, or radar and avionics of the planes the Soviets made for themselves and their close allies.
• Speaking of Soviet small arms, the AK-47 and its many, many descendants. The Kalashnikovs may not be the most accurate and their ergonomics aren't the best, but it is unfailingly reliable — as one expert put it, a weapon that you could take to hell and back. Whether in the jungles of Vietnam or arid Afghanistan or the Siberian Tundra, whether you run it over with a truck or bury it in a corpse-filled bog for a year until it is covered over with rust, the gun will fire as though it were brand new.
  • However, mud and dirt torture tests have proven this to be mostly a myth. The large gaps inherent to the AK design allow dirt and mud right into the inner workings, clogging and jamming them into inoperability. Meanwhile, the tighter tolerances of the AR platform kept the mechanisms clean and running smoothly. The AR/M-16's reliability issues during Vietnam were caused by changes to the ammunition, not a problem with the weapon itself, though that reputation continues to plague it. That said, an AK that's been buried for years is likely to function well once cleaned, and even the newest conscript soldier can be trained pretty easily to clean a rifle.
• The USSR created the first nationwide satellite TV network in the geographically-largest country on Earth, allowing viewers in the Far East to veg out in front of their televisions at the same time as those in the western regions.
• The Soviet Union built an allegedly automated nuclear retaliatory system (though opinions differ if it's fully automated), which the Russian Federation apparently still maintains.
• In The '30s the Soviets also built a working Drill Tank, the Subterrene Trebeleva, though it was deemed impractical at the time, due to enormous amounts of energy it needed to function and too thick and unwieldy cable it must be supplied by. In The '60s there reportedly was an attempt to revisit the idea using an on-board nuclear reactor, but it allegedly failed and killed the entire test-crew, at which point the project was deemed "not worth it" and abandoned. Though this later project is probably nothing more than a simple Perestroyka-times hoax, when a lot of strange rumors surfaced.
• The Soviet space program managed to build the longest-lasting probes ever to touch the surface of Venus. While most the US had one probe launch the ground through dumb luck, Venera 13 survived on the ground transmitting data for a record-setting 127 minutes before being crushed, melted, and dissolved by the harsh Venusian atmosphere. Sure, Venus is a Death World, but at least it's not Siberia.
  • The last two Soviet landers were also piggybacked by French balloon probes.
  • The Russian manned space program is still very much active, while its US counterpart is essentially defunct. So, at least in some sectors, (ex-)Soviets did get to bury Americans. (In the original sense meant by Khrushchev — i.e. "we will outlast you so that we'll be at your funeral.")
  • The R-7 rocket and the Soyuz and Progress capsules have been touted as an excellent example of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" by aerospace experts worldwide. These designs have been in service since the sixties and have racked up a truly staggering launch record. And, for all that people go on about "unsafe" Russian technology, the ratio of launches to accidents have shown these systems to be one of the safest long-term systems in the industry to date. The designs have also been continually improved throughout their service life.
  • The enormous N-1 super-heavy launch vehicle and moon rocket that was the Soviet counterpart to the US's Saturn V both averts this trope, in that all four test flights ended in explosive failures, as well as plays this straight in some of the things that carried on from the N-1. The Soviet moon rocket was an enormously complicated rocket with 30 engines in its first stage alone, and there was never enough money and time (the Soviets having accomplished their feats of spaceflight on a significantly smaller budget than the American space program) to iron out the faults, with none of the test flights having went beyond the first stage. But while the N-1 never had a single success, the engines developed for it, the NK-33 and NK-43, are marvels, that after sitting in a warehouse for decades when the Soviet lunar program was cancelled, astounded the West with their phenomenal performance characteristics. It and its derivatives are now going on to be used in rockets of Russian and American designs.
  • The Soviets were leaders in long-term space habitation, and this shows with their achievements and their space stations.
  • The Buran orbiter, while resembling simply a larger copy of the American Space Shuttle, was actually a far superior spacecraft. It used a different launch and propulsion system, advanced avionics that allowed it to operate unmanned from launch, payload delivery, to landing, and, quite critically and very much against the typical Soviet stereotypes, greater provisions for crew safety than its American counterpart. Too bad budget cuts meant it never got to do any manned spaceflights, having completed only one unmanned mission, before it was mothballed when the Soviet Union collapsed. The only complete Buran orbiter was destroyed in 2002 when its storage hanger collapsed in a storm, putting an end to what was the most advanced reusable heavy launch system ever developed.
• The Soviets attempted to develop a "Badger Bomber", a plane that could also burrow. While it could take off from underground, it couldn't burrow from the air without destroying itself. Had absolutely nothing to do with the conventional jet bomber with the NATO reporting name "Badger".
• Inadvertently spawned by an Australian History Exam in which a BattleTech 'Mech storms the Winter Palace in 1917.
• Some people in the West believed it well enough to attempt to use it for their own goals — such as the aborted attempt to develop a supersonic business jet in 1991 between Sukhoi OKB and Gulfstream.
  • And don't even get us started on the amount of charlatanism being pushed in the post-Soviet Russia using this premise...
• The Soviets also built several weird locomotives, such as a 4-14-4 (longest rigid locomotive in Europe), a steam-diesel locomotive, and the high-pressure steam locomotive V5. After the death of Stalin, the locomotive industry settled for Boring, but Practical.
• While not exactly super-science now, the Soviet TT-26 teletank was technically the first remote controlled Attack Drone built.
• There have also been several real-life inversions of the trope wherein Soviet technology is vastly underestimated only to turn out surprisingly better in ways Western intelligence hadn't even considered. For example, for much of the latter half of the Cold War the R-73 was assumed to have been inferior to the AIM-9 Sidewinder^note Probably because Russian heat-seeking missiles got their start with a crude clone of a 1st-generation Sidewinder; it was simply assumed the Russian designers couldn't have possibly outdone the vastly improved third-generation Sidewinders without having another example to copy from. — until NATO got their hands on their first copies of the non-export-version R-73. They were stunned at how good it was. It was far more agile than the AIM-9, with a much wider seeker arc, and the helmet sight (which the Soviets also fielded before NATO) offered a huge advantage in a dogfight. The one advantage NATO had was in seeker computer tech, since the R-73's was rather crude — but this was little comfort, since when they tested their own far more advanced Sidewinders on Soviet decoys they found that for all its high tech seeker, the AIM-9 was still really easy to decoy with the dirty-burning Russian flares. It should have been better, but in a serious technological oversight the Sidewinder's developers had optimized the missile seeker to discriminate NATO flares, not cruder Russian ones. It led to a huge crisis of confidence — ironically, a reaction more in line with the trope played straight — and a significant push by NATO air forces to catch up in this area (with the American AIM-9X and British ASRAAM basically having the design requirement of being able to do everything the R-73 could), the fruits of which we are seeing today.
• There exists one field where Russia is agreed, by experts on both sides of the Iron Curtain, to have maintained industrial supremacy since the fall of the Tsar, and that is the manufacture of precision optical instruments. Other nations may best Russia in their design, but when it comes to making high-end optics that have already been designed, Russia has 95% market-share. There are only 3 manufacturers in the entire world that produce the large mirrors and lenses used in the telescopes of astronomical observatories; one in Russia (Lytkarino Optical Glass Factory, abbreviated LZOS in Russian), one in Germany (Schott AG), and one in France (known until 2005 as SAGEM for "Société d’Applications Générales de l’Électricité et de la Mécanique". In '05 they merged with French aerospace company SNECMA to form Safran, and the new name for the division that makes optical components is RÉOSC for "Recherche et Étude en Optique et Sciences Connexes"). But the German firm only manufactures the rough blanks, and doesn't have the required personnel or materiel for precision-grinding needed to machine the glass to the extremely tight tolerances needed for telescope mirrors. The French firm can't make the rough blanks, they can only do the precision grinding with already-casted roughs. The Russian factory is the only facility in the world that does both processes in a single factory. Moreover, St. Petersburg (formerly known as Leningrad and prior to that as Petrograd) has an optical-instruments manufacturer known as LOMO, which is, to this day, widely regarded as one of the finest builders of telescopes, cameras, and medical optical instruments in the world. There is a very good reason why so many gun owners insist on fitting their firearms with Russian optics.
  • Recently, Russia consolidated much of its optical industry, including LOMO, LZOS and UOMZ (Ural Optical-Mechanical Plant) into one umbrella company and rebranded it as a "Schwabe holding", named after a Swiss optician Theodor Schwabe who opened a first optical lab producing first domestic Russian glasses and telescopes in Moscow in 1837, which, through a number of reacquisitions, mergers and bureaucratic reshuffles became a predecessor to the current UOMZ plant, an anchor part of the company. Since then Schwabe group developed a rather aggressive market policy, trying to expand into new markets and acquire new subsidiaries in such disparate fields as medical tech and automotive and airplane engines. For example, it currently holds a large part of European market for the baby incubators, due to the long-established expertise UOMZ has in producing them.^note It started producing incubators back in The '60s, when someone noticed a similarity between the needs of a prematurely delivered baby and the high-quality optical glass crucible — UOMZ by then produced its own controlled-atmosphere chambers.
• One of the key technologies of the Lockheed-Martin's F-35B STOVL fighter, the afterburning vectoring nozzle of its PW F135-400 engine, was actually developed in the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War for the Soviet Yak-141 VTOL fighter. Lockheed and Yakovlev briefly collaborated in the early Nineties, and Yakovlev sold them much of its know-how, including the full set of documentation on the cancelled Yak-141. And it doesn't just extends to the nozzle — if you compare the two jets, the similarity is pretty uncanny.
• This actually extends back to the Imperial era.
  • The Fedorov Avtomat is technically the first assault rifle (or something very close to it), as they fire medium-powered 6.5mm Arisaka rounds.
  • The first ever prototype for Powered Armor was developed by Nikolai Yagin in 1890.
  • Before the Russian Revolution and his subsequent departure to the United States, Igor Sikorsky designed the first four-engine airliner "Russky Vityaz", and the first heavy bomber "Ilya Muromets". The latter resulted in one of Russia's current Tu-160 "Blackjack" strategic bombers (all 35 of which are individually named after famous Russians) being named "Igor Sikorsky". This created some controversy, because Sikorsky is much more famous (even in Russia) for his development of American helicopters than for his Russian bomber.
• Honorable mention should go to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a self-taught rocket scientist who developed the principles of spaceflight long before Oberth and Goddard. Unfortunately despite being lauded in Soviet propaganda later in life, his role was minimal because few people outside Russia knew about his work.
  • Except for the one chap called Sergei Korolev... and hence we get Tsiolkovsky sharing the prime spot on the ISS Zvezda bulkhead with none less than Gagarin].
• In 1968, the Soviets made Kitty, the first All-CGI Cartoon.
• In 1959, Soviet geneticist Belyaev started to research the genetics of foxes behavior, and noticed that foxes attitude toward humans seems to be hereditary (programmed by specific mutation of Sor CS 1 gene, albeit it wasn't known at that time). By years of careful selection, Soviet biologists were able to create a specific breed of human-friendly, completely domesticated foxes, who became a popular pets in Soviet Union (and now in the West also).