Hey Californians! If you want to vote for Trump and Unz in the June primary but are not a registered Republican you need to go to your local library and fill out an updated form regeristing as a Republican. independents can vote in the Dem primary, but not the GOP primary. The deadline to do so is April 13, this Wednesday.

Hello from Tehran – no surprise about the prevalence of the Iranic ethnicities, Iran itself has an especially strong STEM culture (until the Qajars lost it to the Ruskies in two infamous treaties, the trans-Caucasus was an Iranian).

Ironically though I’d like to think it had something to do with “Iranianess” it’s instructive to see the relative absence of the most famous of the Iranic ethnicities in the list, the Tajiks. There seems to be something about the Caucasus and the Baltics (perhaps being borderlands between the Russian heartland and relatively cosmpolitan world regions) that account for their disproportionate influence (but then a population like the Buryats disprove that).

Finally I wonder if the relatively lower number for Ukranians (& Belorussians) have anything to do with their relatively fluid identities with the Russian mainstream..

A lot of Soviet Jews (especially the ambitious ones) and nearly all half Jews were officially registered as Russians, Ukrainians, etc. So the true number of Jews among the Soviet scientists was even higher.

Samoyed people don’t even make the list. I would think living in Siberia would select highly for g…but they might be in reservations.

Both Tats and Azeris are Shia not Sunni. The earlier seems to be the more civilized of the two main streams of Islam.

That’s not how this works. If assimilators were less likely to be scientists than strongly identified Jews, it would have decreased the Jewish number rather than increase it.

Russians certainly did not benefit from “affirmative action” overall, because the great majority of the less numerous nationalities benefited from it at their expense.

Kets, last Eurasian remnant of the Dené–Yeniseian family, are absent too. As far as some ethnic minorities in Siberia are concerned, population sizes are so small that even a handful of scientists could get them high on the list.

I’ve often wondered if one of the causes of the Islamic (especially Sunni) intellect’s descent into its current sorry state was the conversion of Iran to Shiism under the Safavids and the loss of intellectual input that represented.

I believe Nima Arkani-Hamed, considered by many to be one of the top theoretical physicists in the world today, and the female mathematician who recently won the Fields medal, are both Azeris. Prettty astonishing for such a small group.

Iran itself has an especially strong STEM culture….

And yet the country has been as few as three months away from having the Bomb for years now.

There was recently a Persian woman from Stanford who won the Fields Medal.

Might have received a boost as a woman but still…if someone can argue your case for the Fields and not be laughed out of the room you’re doing alright for yourself.

Iran might be one of those supposed sleeping giants that actually wakes up. Then again a lot of talent was also already peeled off (friend of mines dad ia an immigrant who chaired the physics department at a second tier state school in California eg). Why don’t liberals care about brain drain, by the way? Surely Mexico and Iran need their cultured Harvard PhDS more than we do if one is talking of moral posturing rather than what’s best for the people themselves.

Less sanguine about the talents of the Gulf Arabs…

Americans can’t comprehend what a giant prison the Soviet Union was. Soviet citizens did not just get on a plane and take a vacation in E. Berlin. Even within the East Bloc, travel was restricted and you had to get clearances to go to another country, which were not granted unless you had a damn good reason for going and were considered politically reliable. Such permission was highly sought after because the quantity and quality of consumer goods in the satellites was better than in the SU. Vacations were usually inside the Soviet Union at some Black Sea resort and would typically be arranged thru your work unit.

For someone who had already indicated their disloyalty by applying to go to Israel, such permission was not likely to be forthcoming.

Typically, Soviet Jews exited by way of Vienna or Rome. If I had to guess, your uncle met scientists who were already on their way out of the country and were in transit to Vienna or something like that. But they were most likely NOT on vacation.

Regarding Muslim potential, you have to understand that the Soviets tried damn hard, using Soviet style (ruthless) measures far beyond what could be done in the West to de-Islamify Soviet Muslims and to some extent they succeeded.

Regarding “petty” anti-Semitic discrimination, it depends what you mean by petty. The math faculty of Moscow State University had a policy not to take Jews, but outright discrimination was illegal. So this was accomplished by giving Jewish applicants special versions of the admission tests that were impossible to pass. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.1556v1.pdf

You have to wonder whether such self-defeating tactics contributed to the Soviet Union losing the Cold War. Having most of its top nuclear scientists in Los Alamos instead of Berlin sure didn’t help the German atomic program.

The ethnic Russians were even more formidably gifted before almost the entire intelligentsia and aristocracy were liquidated by the Jews.

Stephen King thinks the Berlin wall was designed to keep out immigrants!

From The Radio Times (a BBC publication) :

“The idea that we’re not going to allow any of those nasty immigrants into the country,
and we’re going to build a wall between the United States and Mexico – which is ridiculous!” he exclaims.
“I mean how well did that work for the Communists in Berlin? Not so good, right?”

re: King Arthur film – I liked this movie and their take on the Arthurian legend – though, I think in this movie/interpretation, Arthur himself was actually actually descended from Roman and Celtic blood, with the knights of the round table being conscripted Sarmatian fighters.

Achieving a doctoral level qualification is never going to be easy for people from a nomadic herding culture.

In the last decades of the USSR they had a system of boarding schools for children of Siberian nomads. The kids were collected by helicopter in the autumn and spent the summer with their family. But in 1973 that system would have been a recent development.

I think there is a Christian>Shia>Sunni factor at work here.

Tajikistan has become an educational catastrophe since the end of the USSR. Literate parents are raising illiterate kids.

Yep. Famous victims were Andre Geim (of graphene fame) and Sergey Brin’s dad.

What is the breakdown among those who actually accomplished or discovered something in their careers? They seem thin on the ground. I’m under the impression that the Soviet Union employed massive numbers of scientists in factory town type conditions where they tortured wheat seeds and tried to create gorilla-man hybrid soldiers. But a whole lot of their technology, and not just military, came from appropriating the new stuff from Europe and America. Not very impressive. Check out their version of the space shuttle.

Was proximity to the Silk Road a factor in the apparent clustering of high achievement peoples?

You really must be stupid to think a lack of miracle inventions by wonder Jews led to the USSR “losing the Cold War”, or that Germany lost WW2 due to the failings of its embryonic “atomic program”.

Of the four ethnic groups mentioned in the Wiki excerpt, I had previously heard of the Ossetians and only recently heard about the Krymchaks–the latter in a different context. Had no clue regarding the other two. Fascinating stuff.

yet Iranian IQ scores are equal to that of African Americans.

If you count all Iranians with some connection to Azerbaijan, they’re not a small group at all.

‘… gets me wondering how much of the Israeli advantage in telecom software these days is due to KGB investments in sigint and codebreaking in the old days …’

Those KGB ‘old days’ are now a quarter of a century ago and mathematicians typically do their best work when they’re in their twenties so you do the mathematics.

Unless the KGB were able to teach people when they were really, really young.

There are ver y few samoyeds, maybe only a few thousands

And the point is…?

Then, as now, Jews prospered in a system designed to 0ppress White Christians.

This is not news.

“You have to wonder whether such self-defeating tactics contributed to the Soviet Union losing the Cold War. ”

Did Russia lose the Cold War in 1991 by dissolving the Soviet State? American neocons certainly seem upset that she doesn’t act like she lost.

There will almost certainly be a coherent nation state called Russia and filled with Russians in 2091. Americans at that time are predicted to be a 25% minority in a US dominated by Mexicans, Chinese, and Indians.

Russia wisely used its so-called loss to dump its most recalcitrant and intractable minorities in 1991 without losing much of anything that is strategic (Balts, Turkmen and Uzbeks, West Ukrainians – bye, bye!). The shape of the frozen conflicts and the Eurasian Customs Union shows you the shape of Russia in 2091.

The graph presented in Karlin’s post (I did not dig further) has 3 sources of uncertainty.
*
1) Who was classified as a scientist.
*
2) What is the “nationality” or, in American English language,
“ethnicity” of that scientist: the # of the corresponding line, or vertical coordinate on the graph.
*
3) What is the size of population of supposedly that definite “nationality / ethnicity”:
denominator in the fraction {intersection of [1] and [2]} / {size of [3]}.
*
4) I do not think that the procedure of division
and presenting in the form of a graph
yielded any uncertainty.
*
I have no idea how to eliminate uncertainties in 1) and 2).
But at least the person, who has the original data, can eliminate uncertainty 3),
by just providing the numerator: {intersection of [1] and [2]}, i.e.
what was the gross number of people who were both, in his judgement,
scientists and e.g. Estonians.

Think this is right. Worked in finance for telecom hardware/software company with major r&d presence in Israel. Most of the senior people I worked with were raised in Israel, though perhaps they were children of ex-Soviets.

By the way, the Israeli government heavily subsidized our r&d there. It absolutely distorted decision making. Plenty of investment in high risk projects that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Where are the Germans in this list? Huge oversight.

The best cryptographers, cryptologists, and computer scientists in information security have been educated at MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, Princeton for more than 30 years. They have been getting grants from and working for the NSA since they were grad students. The Technion is now one of the best schools for this work, but the training their profs had was NSA funded in the US. Overwhelmingly, these scientists are Israeli or American Jews. No KGB necessary.

Edward Frenkel gives a nice account of his rigged entrance examination here:

I’m a huge Steve Sailer fan and even take the risk of recommending him to people I don’t know to be right-wing, but one things to keep in mind about Steve is that for a guy who coined the term Ockam’s Butterknife he isn’t really that careful about avoiding hyper-baroque triple bank shot reasoning himself.

Mostly they were in Alabama.

On balance the movement of people was freer within the USSR than within the US of that time. The number of places with security personnel at the door was orders of magnitude lower in the USSR. A Soviet person expected to be able to enter almost any building without having to explain to anyone why he wanted to do so and without having to show an ID. Usually there was simply no one to show it to. Schools, factories, offices, stores, libraries, etc. were unguarded. The Kremlin was unguarded. You just walked in through one of the towers.

There were no “bad” neighborhoods. That particular restriction on movement was missing.

The propiska system limited movement, but I think that in the psychological sense the two considerations I listed above outweighed it. You generally entered buildings more often than you wanted to permanently move to another part of the country. Also, the propiska system kept the numerous ethnicities of the USSR from being mixed up and assimilated into a giant EU-like gray mass. It promoted ethnic continuity and interethnic peace. So it was actually a good thing. Moscow only began to be filled up with Central Asians once the propiska system was abolished.

I have worked in Israel a great deal. Most of the top scientists and researchers (who I have met) were overwhelmingly Ashkenazi Israeli born. I was told that many of the Russian Jewish scientists who got out went to or had to leave for America or Canada or the UK because Israel was too small to absorb so many highly educated persons – there simply were not enough teaching positions or spots in industry (especially for mathematicians). The guy who founded WhatsApp and one of the Google guys were children of ex Jewish Soviet but I really doubt that they would have become billionaires in Israel. Maybe the true impact is coming from the ones born in Israel or who arrived as children in the 90s and onward. Has to be a good gene pool.

You had to register as Rep/Dem by October, 2015 to vote in April in NY. Kollivornia is much more democratic than NY State. What we wouldn’t give for initiative, referendum, and recall in this state.

“The decent performance of Tats and Azeris suggests that Islamic culture and scientific competence aren’t as inevitably antithetical as you might suspect.”

Welllll … or maybe it suggests that biology matters more than nominal religion. Krymchaks (crypto-Jews) and Tats and Azeris (crypto-Persians) stem from ethnes with well established histories of achievement.

This is like the claims about the oft-cited but barely experienced Islamic Golden Age of Science, in which most of the notable scientists of the Arabo-Islamic “Golden Age” turn out to be Persians, Jews, recycled Greeks or Helleno-Egyptians, plagiarized Indians, etc., and often they are of only recent or dubious Muslim-ness. Islam takes the credit–or such credit as is available–for the work of what were really subject peoples.

Islam was originally a minority religion of a conquering warrior elite who lived parasitically on the fruits–literal and figurative–of the conquered. As in the modern Western welfare states, a parasite class can be supported for time, providing that there are sufficient Jizyah-payers to keep the parasites in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. With time, the Jizyah-payers think “enough of this” and convert (nominally) to Islam to live on someone else’s Jizyah. This works until the increasing parasites swamp the diminishing hosts. Then you end up with … well, the Muslim world of the last few centuries: moribund, jealous, internecinely hostile. The only ways for Muslims out of this dead end are either

1) to abandon Islam, or at least the most civilizationally destructive aspects of it, which had been happening in a mild way as the more intelligent Muslims recognized and emulated Western superiority, or

2) to find new lands of dhimmi jizya-payers to begin the whole destructive cycle over again.

Fortunately, after centuries of negative experiences with Islam, today none of Islam’s neighbors is stupid enough to allow hordes of hostile Muslims colonists into their lands … oh, wait!

Genrikh Yagoda is a character worth reading up on. He killed 10 million people. But who has heard of him?

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html

“Islamic culture and scientific competence aren’t as inevitably antithetical as you might suspect”: depends. In so far as there ever was a Muslim Golden Age, it seems to have been the product of Persians, Greeks, and others on whom the Arabs had yet to fix Islamic religion securely.

Past performance is no guarantee of future performance, or the world would be ruled from Egypt.

The early Soviet period had forced deportations which may account for the mix of ethnic groups. Kalashnikov’s family were wealthy agrarians until they were deported. The Kalashnikovs could be Turkic or Tartar. It is not clear that characterizing people by place names makes much sense since the people of central Asian were so nomadic.

OT: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3528236/Male-Norwegian-politician-raped-asylum-seeker-says-feels-GUILTY-attacker-deported-man-suffer-Somalia.html

Quite a few native Siberian peoples appear in the list: Yakuts, Buryats, Khakassians, Altaians, Evenks.

You are ignorant concerning this matter.

Geim isn’t Jewish.

Estonians are above Latvians who are above Lithuanians. I first learned about the stereotype of Estonians being the most orderly and efficient Balts, and Lithuanians being the most lackadaisical ones about 20 years ago.

There is a north-south gradient in human capital among farmers’s descendents in many, many regions of Europe and of the world in general. Italy, the former Yugoslavia, Spain, etc. Farming in high latitudes must have selected for intelligence and a lot of other traits.

Relatively small north-south-oriented regions like the Baltic area, Italy and the former Yugoslavia are good test cases because they eliminate a lot of extraneous variables. Ceteris paribus the latitude at which a man’s ancestors ploughed the earth is very important.

This is literally insane a complete inversion of reality.

Closed cities were established in the Soviet Union from the late 1940s onwards under the euphemistic name of “post boxes”, referring to the practice of addressing post to them via mail boxes in other cities. They fell into two distinct categories.
The first category comprised relatively small communities with sensitive military, industrial, or scientific facilities, such as arms plants or nuclear research sites.[2] Examples are the modern towns of Ozyorsk (Chelyabinsk-65) with a plutonium production plant, and Sillamäe, the site of a uranium enrichment facility. Even Soviet citizens were not allowed access to these places without proper authorization. In addition to this, some bigger cities were closed for unauthorized access to foreigners, while they were freely accessible to Soviet citizens. These included cities like Perm, a center for Soviet tank production, and Vladivostok, the base of the Soviet Pacific Fleet.

The second category consisted of border cities (and some whole border areas, such as the Kaliningrad Oblast, Saaremaa, and Hiiumaa) which were closed for security purposes. Comparable closed areas existed elsewhere in the East bloc; a substantial area along the inner German border and the border between West Germany and Czechoslovakia was placed under similar restrictions (although by the 1970s foreigners could cross the latter by train). Citizens were required to have special permits to enter such areas.

The locations of the first category of the closed cities were chosen for their geographical characteristics. They were often established in remote places situated deep in the Urals and Siberia, out of reach of enemy bombers. They were built close to rivers and lakes which were used to provide the large amounts of water needed for heavy industry and nuclear technology. Existing civilian settlements in the vicinity were often used as sources of construction labour. Although the closure of cities originated as a strictly temporary measure which was to be normalized under more favorable conditions, in practice the closed cities took on a life of their own and became a notable institutional feature of the Soviet system.[3]

Movement to and from closed areas was tightly controlled. Foreigners were prohibited from entering them and local citizens were under stringent restrictions. They had to have special permission to travel there or leave, and anyone seeking residency was required to undergo vetting by the NKVD and its successor agencies. Access to some closed cities was physically enforced by surrounding them with barbed wire fences monitored by armed guards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_city#Soviet_Union_closed_cities

On December 27, 1932 the USSR Central Executive Committee and Sovnarkom issued a decree About establishment of the Unified Passport System within the USSR and the Obligatory Propiska of Passports. The declared purposes were the improvement of population bookkeeping in various urban settlements and “the removal of persons not engaged in industrial or other socially-useful work from towns and cleansing of towns from hiding kulaks, criminals and other antisocial elements. “Hiding kulaks” was an indication at fugitive peasants who tried to run away from the collectivization. “Removal” usually resulted in some form of forced labour.
Passports were introduced for urban residents, sovkhozniks and workers of novostroykas (новостройка, a major construction site of a new town, plant, railway station, etc.). It should be noted that according to the 1926 Soviet Census 82% of population in the Soviet Union was rural. Kolkhozniks and individual peasants did not have passports and could not move into towns without permission. Permissions were given by chairpersons of collective farms or rural councils. Repeated violation of the passport regime was a criminal offence. Passports were issued by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (Soviet law enforcement) and until the 1970s had a green cover.

The implementation of the passport system was based on the USSR Sovnarkom decree dated April 22, 1933 About the Issue of Passports to the USSR Citizens in the territory of the USSR. The document declared that all citizens at least sixteen years old residing in cites, towns, and urban workers’ settlements, as well as residing within one hundred kilometres of Moscow and Leningrad, within fifty kilometres of Kharkov, Kiev, Minsk, Rostov-on-Don and Vladivostok and within the hundred-kilometre zone along the Western border of the USSR were required to have a passport with propiska. Within these territories passports were the only valid personal identification document. Since 1937 all passports had a photo headshot of its owner.

On September 10, 1940 the USSR Sovnarkom decreed the Passport Statute (Russian: Положение о паспортах, Položenye o pasportakh). It provisioned a special treatment of propiska in capital cities of republics, krais, and oblasts, in state border areas and at important railroad junctions.
On October 21, 1953 the USSR Council of Ministers decreed the new Passport Statute. It made passports obligatory for all citizens older than sixteen years in all non-rural settlements. Rural residents could not leave their place of residence for more than thirty days, and even for this leave a permit from a selsoviet was required. The notion of “temporary propiska” was introduced, in addition to the regular or “permanent” one. A temporary propiska was issued for work-related reasons and for study away from home.
Since the First Congress of Collective Farms Workers in the summer of 1969, the Council of Ministers of the USSR relieved the rural residents from procedural difficulties in obtaining the Soviet passport.
On August 28, 1974 the USSR Council of Ministers issued a new Statute of the Passport System in the USSR and new rules of propiska. The latter rules were in effect until October 23, 1995. However the “blanket passportisation” was started only in 1976 and finished in 1981.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport_system_in_the_Soviet_Union

Classing them both as Mercurians isn’t totally useless but, given that we all already know this about them, it leaves out the most informative second axis: with mercurialism as with violence, IQ and organization are capital.

Of course, Wikipedia is such a marvelously impartial resource and is to be believed in every instance.

Russia wisely used its so-called loss to dump its most recalcitrant and intractable minorities

Those grapes were sour anyway!

Right – they dumped Estonia but kept Chechnya for this exact reason.

Did Russia lose the Cold War in 1991 by dissolving the Soviet State?

The USSR lost the Cold War. But the USSR’s defeat was Russia’s victory.

There will almost certainly be a coherent nation state called Russia and filled with Russians in 2091. Americans at that time are predicted to be a 25% minority in a US dominated by Mexicans, Chinese, and Indians.

Demography is destiny:

The Hispanic population is expected to reach about 106 million in 2050, about double what it is today, according to new U.S. Census Bureau population projections.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/16/with-fewer-new-arrivals-census-lowers-hispanic-population-projections-2/

Glossy’s views regarding the USSR are a tad rose-tinted ……

World War T update

OT, but latest transgenderer Anohni, formerly Antony of Antony and the Johnsons, comments in the Guardian

She’s scornful, though, of how politicians have made trans rights flavour of the month:

“They realise that it’s not politically advantageous to make scapegoats of trans people, because it’s such a popular Hollywood topic.”

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/apr/09/trans-singer-anohni-new-album-hopelessness#comment-72074621

Examples are the modern towns of Ozyorsk (Chelyabinsk-65) with a plutonium production plant, and Sillamäe, the site of a uranium enrichment facility. Even Soviet citizens were not allowed access to these places without proper authorization

For the sake of humanity’s health and welfare I sincerely hope that random US citizens are not allowed to access US nuclear facilities. And I’m sure that in fact they aren’t.

Is Andre Geim Jewish?

Whose designing Russia’s Military and Space Technology these days?

Shouldn’t Jewish Russian scientists and engineers in the US be considered part of the Israeli Fifth Column?

Why can’t Iran have 200-400 nukes?

If Donald Trump bombs Iran…would this mean war with Conservative Christian Russia?

Re Central Asian Muslims and science, there’s a deep history there: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9871.html

I actually wasn’t talking about propiska at all, just about crossing the Soviet border into the East Bloc, but the idea that people were “freer” in the USSR is laughable.

Pre-2001 and especially pre-1970s, most public buildings in the US did not have much security either. With each new round of terrorist attacks, security tightens. Back in the day you could meet your family and friends right at the airport gate.

There is a name for a system where your place of residence within your own country is tied to your birthplace – it’s called serfdom.

Russian speaking Jews (and a minority of non Jews that pretended to be Jews to get the hell out of an imploding former Soviet landscape) are a formidable presence in Tel Aviv and the tech industry. Generally speaking, I’d much rather live in Moscow than Tel Aviv, but there’s no question that many smart people chose otherwise at some point in time.

Also, though I admire Russian intelligence and culture, I’ve not seen research that has caused me to think that the Russian aristocracy per se nurtured a formidable intellectual prowess – I’d be interested to see if there is some evidence to support this idea. In general, it has always struck me that Russian slavs appear to be brighter in general than white Americans or white British, but to a person these are all people that would have come from merchant, peasant or priest stock.

Ossetians are interesting people. They have their own epic mythology that goes back to Sarmatians, which makes it at least as old as the Greek mythology. It shares some motifs with it, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nart_saga

Ossetians’ immediate ancestors were Alans. Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus describes them as follows, “Their hair is somewhat yellow, their eyes are terribly fierce.” So the ancient Alans were blond. Ossetians, however, are generally not blond.

This has to do a lot with the degree of urbanization. For instance the Russians appear to be represented twice as much as the Ukrainians though it is hard to point to real ethnic differences between the two groups (peace Ukrainian nationalism). The difference is due to the fact that Ukraine was and still is mostly an agricultural country. That industry and urbanization which Ukraine has is located in the eastern part of the country – the mostly Russian Donbass-region.
On the other hand the Jews benefited from the Bolshevik Revolution and moved/migrated from the rural Pale Settlement to the main cities of USSR where they replaced the (mostly Russian and German) imperial bureaucracy of the Tsar which was literally exterminated by the Bolsheviks. According to Slezkine the degree of urbanization of the Jews became +90% by the end of the 1930s, and 95% by 1959, as opposed to 54% urbanization in 1959 for the ethnic Russians.
Add here that the Jews migrated and concentrated not in whatever small cities but in the most important ones, the centers of scientific and artistic activity, and you get a more balanced picture.

don’t let anybody tell you Stalin was stupid

A long time ago I read the memoires of Konstantin Simonov, a famous Soviet writer and an official in the Writer’s Union. Stalin often invited him to talk about literature. Who’s good, who’s bad, in what way, what writers should write about instead, etc. Long conversations like that. The interestimg thing is that Stalin didn’t delegate this task. All subsequent Soviet leaders did. He read through large quantities of the lit fic of his time and then talked about it with the authors themselves.

To what extent were Louis XIV, Louis XIII, etc. the authors of the styles that were named after them? I don’t know. I would think that Queen Victoria had almost nothing to do with Victorianism. I’ve read enough about Stalin to know that he was the principal author of his style. The look of central Moscow subway stations, of the 7 sister towers, of the Soviet movies of his time, the feel of the novels, the sound of the popular music, etc. are all reflections of what he personally liked.

Napoleon went in a similar direction I think – restrained imperial grandeur. The Trotskyists whom Stalin defeated were all into avant-garde crap.

In the movies, it’s always some Nazi who says to the hero, “Papers, please”, but, as noted above, internal passports were a Soviet invention first used to find escaping kulaks.

Why should the Soviet Union allow a citizen to leave when the state picked up the tab for the health care and education of that citizen? That’s the lesson I take. Don’t allow the state to fund your life from cradle to grave, and maybe the state won’t behave as if you were their property.

You would think Americans of the same ethic background who were adversely affected by this rationale in the USSR would be eager to not have similar conditions arise in the USA. In a sane world Bernie Sanders would have taken this lesson to heart and would not be campaigning on ‘everything is free’. Because in the end everything isn’t free and you’ll end up being owned.

Your idea of Soviet science comes from propaganda. Obviously, most scientists don’t achieve groundbreaking discoveries, but overall Soviet science has a pretty good record. It is often not given enough credit in the West.

As for the shuttle, the American and Soviet versions have almost nothing in common except shape.

This list is per capita. But what about gross totals? What percent of the total USSR where Jews, Russians, etc.? It looks like the great majority of scientists would have been ethnic Russians.

You start by saying that the movement of people was freer in the USSR and end by explaining that the movement was actually restricted but it was beneficial.

You have to click through to the original blog entry to see the absolute numbers. http://burckina-faso.livejournal.com/1508908.html

Look at the first chart to see the absolute numbers. The largest slice of the pie, blue, is Russians. The second largest, green, is Ukrainians. And the third, yellow, is Jews. Then come Armenians, Belorussians, and Georgians.

As always, it is 6 Trillion.

“…3 sources of uncertainty.
*
“1) Who was classified as a scientist.”

It’s been a long time and I forget where/when it was discussed. Back in (probably) the early 70s(?), maybe a little earlier, maybe a little latter. Anyhow, there was a lot of angst about the number of Soviet scientists in the USSR and the size of the USSR education pipeline that was producing scientists. There was what would now be called a STEM-gap, with the US producing significantly fewer scientists than the Soviets. The US was going to fall way behind!

After a few years with more focused attention, it became clear that although the Soviets had numerically more “scientists”, only about a quarter were actually doing daily what we would call science, that is, had an actual scientific career. (I recall the 1/4 number, but my recall might not be exact, in any case it was of this order.) So the real number of Soviet scientists was 1/4 of the “graduated” number (or perhaps of what you might call the “working number”, due to the garbage man “sanitation engineer” effect).

The situation in the US, with native-born STEM graduates, may be getting similar today.

On the other hand, he was there, possibly unlike you, and certainly unlike Sam.

No listing for ethnic German, who were the most discriminated against group in the old USSR. They were not even allowed to go to the university in the 1970s. Given the German hang for science, the USSR lost out by not giving them a chance. No wonder the majority have left the former USSR.

Israel behind assassinations of Iran nuclear scientists, Ya’alon hints

Israel’s Mossad Trained Assassins of Iran Nuclear Scientists, Report Says

Covert war against Iran’s nuclear scientists: a widow remembers The wife of the first scientist to be assassinated speaks about her husband’s growing fear of a net closing around him – and of meeting his Israeli-trained assassin before his execution.

Or did the Soviet Union fall because it was so top-heavy with Jewish scientists? It’s possible that many of these scientists were actually helping to undermine the Soviets because of their perceived mistreatment.

Lets not forget the jewish Bolsheviks killed off 60+ million too smart to submit to communism. Then the jewish Bolsheviks helped Moa kill off 100+ million Chinese too smart for communism. I bet there would have been a lot of smart Kulaks if Russia’s Czar didn’t exile the jewish Bolsheviks when he defeated them.

Getting Refuseniks out of the USSR was active in the late 1980s. I knew of such programs and the lengths to which secrecy of actions was pursued.

A mild surprise to me is that some of the Finno Ugric peoples of Russia do quite badly: Khantis, Maris, Veps, Udmurts, Mansi, Modvinians and Karelians are in the bottom third of the table (an exception are the Estonians who are sixth overall). One would suppose that these cousins to the Finns would have done better.

The US government/establishment disagrees.

The ghost of 1979 is still alive but it’s time to move on for the US establishment. There’s plenty of evidence that suggests Iranians aren’t that into their religion or their leaders(especially the latter) but the US still wants to be friends with “other” nations around the Persian Gulf.

I think if you ask Sanders, he would tell you that what he has in mind is democratic socialism similar to that practiced in Denmark, not soviet socialism.

All modern economies (the US included) have certain “socialist” aspects. We have free public schools, free pensions and health care for senior citizens, free food for people who don’t make enough to buy their own, subsidized housing for various groups (plus a mortgage interest deduction for almost everyone), government operated mass transit, a government owned postal system, etc. At various times, the US government has owned large part of the railroad industry, the auto industry, etc. Other aspects of the US economy combine the WORST aspects of private industry with government funding in order to maximize inefficiency. Government doesn’t build the $5,000 airplane toilet seat or the $1,000,000 heart operation, it just pays for it, with your money. Some of these things as American as apple pie and people don’t even think of them as being socialist, though they are. The train left the station on “socialism” long before Sanders was born.

Yeah,
they lost all these states on a technicality in the USSR set up. None of the ethnic “republics” inside Russia was allowed to leave.

OT: Alleged attack by Trump supporter at Wichita gas station.

http://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article65903602.html

Anyone remember this story from last month? When it first appeared, I was convinced that it was a complete hoax and no such attack occurred. Since then, the police released security camera footage of the altercation, but of course there’s no audio to corroborate the students’ claims. Apart from a local news story saying that police had IDed the alleged attacker, there haven’t been any stories with additional information. Of course, the Trump angle garnered a lot of coverage by the usual suspects. Oddly (ok, not really oddly if you are an Steve fan), most of the news stories showed only a brief excerpt from the video. THe story I linked to above clearly shows one of the students, in the light colored hoodie, yell something before the white guy on the motorcycle rides up. Words are clearly exchanged, and the short Hispanic hoodie guy puts his hand on the white guy’s chest before blows are exchanged.

If anyone (maybe local to the scene) has any more info, I’d be interested in seeing if there’s any corroboration at all to the Trump angle. If not, it seems that ambitious, politically active minorities are trying to create controversy, knowing that the MSM will eat it up like candy.

Also, the Muslim student is a real pussy. At least the little Hispanic guy had some balls (but not much common sense).

This is some anti-Semetic revisionism. Jews were both the liquidators & the liquidated during the Soviet era.

Contradiction of fears of Islamic anti-intellectualism?
On the contrary, this only bears out what was already suggested by Arab empires depending on Persian bureaucracy to function. Islam was an attempt to end Semitic tribalism by founding a meta-tribe that would obviate blood feuding and nepotism by including the whole world. Not only has it failed, but it probably exacerbates tribalism as a survival mechanism for minorities who see the brainless Sunni Arab washing away ancient civilizational survivals, perhaps how clusters of whites will peer out over near-future hordes. Oh no, you must let me teach my child calculus, it is our tradition: we will riot if the math homework is interrupted!

I think one has to consider the definition of ‘scientist’ in USSR. They had diploma mills way before we knew the term. All these graphs (may) show are the sociology of the various tribes there, not their achievement potential. Maybe getting a science degree was the thing to do for a good factory job if your tribe was urban?

Hello, Mr. TheLatestInDecay:
I got in USPS mail the copy of the book “No More Champagne” about the finances of Churchill family, which book I bought following you mentioning it.
Very interesting.
What I can’t understand is why did they need gambling ?
Does it mean that their women were not attractive enough ?

——–This graph once against demonstrates that UC Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine’s otherwise outstanding 2004 book “The Jewish Century” gets off to a bad start by asserting a conceptual grouping of Jews and Gypsies as “Mercurians.”——–

‘Mercurians’ doesn’t necessarily mean success or positive stuff. It means being rootless and wandering. Gyspies have been that. Jews mastered banking, gypsies pickpocketing.
Both are Mercurian occupations.

Another area where Jews and Jips have something in common:

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/gypsy-melodies/Content?oid=886664

“We’re reminded at times of the persecution of other peoples, such as blacks, Jews, and homosexuals, and of the emotionally rich cultures that have resulted.”

Well, maybe Palestinians have one thing to look forward to. Maybe Nakba and Occupation will lead to lots of Pallie Einsteins and Mahlers. Mexicans lived under Conquis for centuries, and look what vibrant culture they got. Pointy shoes.

Owen Lattimore on the Buryats:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=KXxI9sa-GRE#t=3043

The Soviet version of the shuttle actually improved on the American design in nearly every way, including being able to take off and land autonomously. They only pulled the plug on it because the Soviet Union fell & the industrial base that built it was scattered among the various republics. But Soviet scientists and engineers were often first rate.

Well, the Russians can still put a man in space, unlike us. And they built some effective and durable military equipment.

I’m under the impression that the Soviet Union employed massive numbers of scientists in factory town type conditions where they tortured wheat seeds and tried to create gorilla-man hybrid soldiers.

Professional tip, it will help you later in life: comic books aren’t history books.

Yes, even if access to public buildings in one’s hometown is your measure of “freedom” (a rather odd measure, that), the US has always been freer than Russia in that regard. It was freer during the Cold War period and it’s freer today.

And much of the loss of said “freedom” in the US case was due to JFK’s assassination by a Soviet sympathizer and the Soviet-sponsored terror attacks of the ’70s.

He’s joking.

I don’t believe Jews were the liquidated, if by the liquidated you mean the ones targeted for mass collective punishment. I don’t doubt some Jews were maliciously attacked. But if Jews were the target then I’d suspect the Hammer and Sickle would have the status today of the Swastika. I doubt open communist parties with their Soviet style party flags would be treated as respectable in today’s media. Instead their symbols would be banned and their parties treated like the Golden Dawn. Even Max Boot feels OK about voting for Stalin. I doubt he’d say that about Hitler.

Any low-info liberal with 2 masters degrees in LGBT film will tell you Muslims were kings of Science– in the 15th Century. What really destroyed their pursuit of STEM brownie points was laissez-faire capitalism, to which Islamic culture has never adapted. Then they started losing wars too

Thanks, that’s interesting.

From various sources it seems he was discriminated against either because he was an ethnic German, or because his name sounded Jewish.

You had to register as Rep/Dem by October, 2015 to vote in April in NY. Kollivornia is much more democratic than NY State. What we wouldn’t give for initiative, referendum, and recall in this state.

The many ways in which NY is far from being a model of democracy never seems to have worried the NYT much. Widespread corruption, long-running organized crime control of much of the NYC economy and the outrageously gerrymandered NY State Senate were mostly ignored while the NYT was preoccupied with how the world should be remade.

It seems the Romans described every tribe in Europe as “blond” or “red-haired.”

They probably perceived color differently than us. They would not have seen as many vivid colors on a regular basis. Doesn’t mean the Ossetians have changed in looks that much over the years.

The Romans were probably just describing brown (as opposed to black) hair. The sun made everyone’s hair a little bit lighter back in the day, and European hair lightens as it grows as well. I spend a lot of time outdoors, and I notice that when I haven’t had my hair cut/layered in awhile my normally almost-black hair gets sun-bleached reddish brown.

Government doesn’t build the $5,000 airplane toilet seat

Actually it does. From my understanding we get $5000 airplane toilet seats due to some bureaucracy over spec’ing the contract.

Mr. Glossy:
I am not trying to enter the arguments between you and other participants of the discussion.
Since you mentioned Stalin, you may be interested to look at Viktor Suvorov’s books:
in English,

The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II ,
*
and you probably can read in Russian:

*
http://www.amazon.com/Ochishchenie-Zachem-Stalin-Obezglavil-Armiiu/dp/B0017OY8II/
(albeit currently unavailable; availability and prices do fluctuate.)

“Americans can’t comprehend what a giant prison the Soviet Union was.”

Sure we can. We’re becoming that way ourselves now.

“Finally I wonder if the relatively lower number for Ukranians (& Belorussians) have anything to do with their relatively fluid identities with the Russian mainstream.”

Perhaps those groups had a bigger demographic bite taken out of them by the purges, the gulag, and the war.

Geim has spoken of his ethnic background quite extensively. He is mostly Volga German and part Jewish.

Lysenko and his misguided experiments are fairly well known. Ilia Ivanov was would-be the human-ape breeder. The unproductive factory town labs were a reality that’s easily confirmed.
I haven’t read any comic books in a long time but I have read some soviet era textbooks. They have some similar characteristics.

“Right – they dumped Estonia but kept Chechnya for this exact reason.”

At least Russia had some kind of historical claim on Chechnya, however weak. What is our excuse for seemingly trying to annex Afghanistan and Iraq?

Really? That’s not the impression he gave. How do you know? Are you him?

“The Soviet version of the shuttle actually improved on the American design in nearly every way, including being able to take off and land autonomously.”

The American shuttle takes off autonomously too. All rockets do. Humans have never been employed to pilot rockets on ascent. We could have had the shuttle land remotely too. However it would have defeated the purpose of having a shuttle, which was to give astronauts something to do.

Yes, perceptions of hair colour change even on a much shorter time scale than two thousand years. The Napoleonic conscription authorities recorded a much lower percentage of blonds among their charges than their successors later in the nineteenth century. The actual frequency of that trait in the population is very unlikely to have altered.

Yes, I’m aware it wasn’t all secret ape-men labs. I’m sort of joking. There was serious science and they beat us to space…. But you would laugh at those college textbooks.

Suvorov is a hack who has been discredited long ago.

Churchill agreed that driving out the Jews hurt the Nazi war effort. In the famous speech where he spoke of “the Few” he noted: “Since the Germans drove the Jews out and lowered their technical standards, our science is definitely ahead of theirs.”

But Jewish engineers and scientists definitely helped the Soviets overall – even if quotas lowered Jewish chances in some admissions. One invention by a Jew certainly helped the USSR win against the Nazis. The head designer and engineer of the t-34 tank was a Jew (Mikahil Koshkin) and pretty much everyone says that this was the best tank of the war. Again, there were quotas against Jews in the US in the 1930s but this did not hinder Jewish success or contributions to the US at all. Jews who went to City College won many Nobels. Did it really matter that they did not get into Harvard?

“Having most of its top nuclear scientists in Los Alamos instead of Berlin sure didn’t help the German atomic program.”

There was only one top german-jewish physicist working on the Manhattan Project, Hans Bethe, and one top italian physicist (gentile, but with a jewish wife), Enrico Fermi. From Europe, there were a few journeymen scientists like Klaus Fuchs (gentile anti-Nazi), and some second rank talent: Otto Frisch and Edward Teller (although how much he contributed to the success of the Manhattan Project is a matter of some dispute. For the most part, the work was done by Americans (many of them jewish. but certainly not all) and, to a lesser extent, Britons.

It’s easy to think of a scenario where the best and brightest among Eastern Orthodox minorities of European Russia had assimilated into Russians long before that survey.

Muslims like Tatars or Chechens on the other hand seem to be more clannish and insistent on keeping their identity.

Not closed facilities but entire closed cities. Not just the plants but whole cities were closed. Not just closed but non-existent – not even appearing on maps. The closest thing in the US would have been Los Alamos during WWII.

The Russians were paranoid about the damage that espionage could do because they knew what they had done to us.

A minute ago you were telling us how open everything was in the SU. Which is it?

Off the shelf commercial items (like hammers) may now be procured at commercial wholesale pricing by the USG without burdening them with normal Department of Defense government contracting overhead.

I like the part in the article that goes (verbatim) “Child kidnappers, chicken thieves… Who really cares about chickens anyway” before retailing some doofy idea for performance art.

Real gyps (O.G.) are tacky loons who screech to idiotic tinker-toy tunes while wearing dirt & rags, not the romantic boheme kind of image that they unfairly benefit from due to the Hi-Q. labors from Belle epoque fey white Mitteleuropeans. Nobody ever got the movement going for cockneys as cutesy dispossessed (excepting race traitor Eliza D) because the name itself is unpleasant. Style/glamour is all– look at how popular the Black Panthers & Nazis still are. “Palestinian” is a dubious name already but imagine if the Anglo-imperial term for them were “Scuzzchunks” or “Fukuyamians”

No, you really don’t get it. The Soviets were in a whole different league. The US would have to get 1000 times worse than it is now. The stuff we have to put up with is a minor inconvenience compared to what Soviets had to deal with, especially before the death of Stalin. It was literally beyond your imagination.

Of course, Wikipedia is such a marvelously impartial resource and is to be believed in every instance.

Feel free to provide information to the contrary…..

There are many indications that Stalin was planning a mass action against Jews shortly before his death. Probably this would have taken the form of a forced exile to some distant corner of the Soviet Union – that was his usual m.o. with other ethnic groups in disfavor. Of course many would have died in transit and due to bad conditions once they arrived.

While Jews were not targeted for collective punishment, plenty were caught up in the net of the purges. And of course Jewish religious and cultural life was destroyed – nothing that was not co-opted by the Communist Party could be allowed to exist.

Post Stalin and especially post-1967, traditional Russian anti-Semitism reasserted itself but this mostly took the form of discrimination in jobs, university admissions, etc. rather than large scale violence.

On the other hand, he was there, possibly unlike you, and certainly unlike Sam.

On the other hand, I know lots of Russians and Ukrainians who were of age during the Brezhnev era (the man, the myth, the legend), and their recollections are quite a bit gloomier than Glossy’s…..

To what extent were Louis XIV, Louis XIII, etc. the authors of the styles that were named after them? I don’t know. I would think that Queen Victoria had almost nothing to do with Victorianism. I’ve read enough about Stalin to know that he was the principal author of his style. The look of central Moscow subway stations, of the 7 sister towers, of the Soviet movies of his time, the feel of the novels, the sound of the popular music, etc. are all reflections of what he personally liked.

It was really more of a reflection of what was going on in the world. Public architecture in the USA, Nazi Germany, and the USSR looked a lot alike in the ’30s.

By what metric? There are available statistics of GULAG inmates for most years, and the proportion of Jews was at most half of their proportion in the general population throughout. They weren’t targeted in any of the ethnic operations in the 1930s or after the war, though it was rumored that Stalin planned a huge “anti-Zionist” operation and show trial before he died, but he actually killed only maybe 500 during the actual anti-Zionist operation and trials, which is nothing by Stalin’s standards. All the while their proportion among the higher echelons of the party and especially the repressive apparatus was much higher than their proportion among the general population until well into the late 1930s.

Dunno. You were the guy who was talking about how people could saunter into just about any building in the old USSR…..

It’s a good question but I don’t know the answer. Gambling has always been the vice I lacked. Both Churchill’s mother and his wife seem attractive in photos from the time of their respective weddings. The book makes clear how totally in the teeth of his Jewish bankers Churchill was when making his courageous and principled decisions to firebomb entire cities full of German men, women, and children and to destroy great centers of Europe’s cultural patrimony.

An interesting documentary on Stalinist architecture:

The existence of closed cities in the Soviet Union is a matter of undeniable historical fact. There are thousands of other references beside wikipedia that would confirm this. A search of “soviet union closed cities” has over half a million hits. Read the first few hits if you doubt the wiki. No one (sane) denies that they existed, so I don’t know what your point is.

As I mentioned before, the US had something of an equivalent in Los Alamos during WWII. The Soviets just considered a lot more stuff to be top secret than we did. Instead of considering just their #1 top secret weapon development center to be ultra secret, they set up dozens and stayed permanently on a war footing thru the entire Cold War.

Feynman was not a big fan of the secrecy behind the Manhattan Project. He thought it actually impeded progress. He was sent on a field trip to Oak Ridge and he found out that the people designing the plant hadn’t (because of secrecy) been told what the characteristics of uranium were and what it would take to trigger a chain reaction. Because of this, he discovered that the plant had been designed in such a way that there would have been numerous dangerous criticality incidents if he hadn’t caught them. He lobbied to be allowed to explain a certain amount to them and then they were able to figure out on their own how to design the plant so it would not blow up.

Likewise, there was a group of bright high school graduates at Los Alamos assigned to run the IBM punch card tabulators that functioned as sort of crude computers. At first they were just given bunch of math problems to solve but not told what they meant and whether higher was better or lower was better or what. As a result they found the work incredibly boring. He got permission to give them some background on the meaning of the math problems and their productivity shot way up and they devise better faster ways to solve the problems on their own and considerably sped up the program.

Given this, you have to wonder how much of the Soviet obsession with secrecy was self defeating.

As with Chinese and Jews, the thing is, both are correct. Tons of geniuses and tons of fakers. In fact, it’s totally consistent with the artless “ramping-up until the machine breaks,” applied by both Chinese and Jews to most processes, to just crank up the mill and accept more fakers as an externality of more geniuses.

At the top of the list, Jews are first by a mile, but then come Georgians (e.g., Stalin and Beria — don’t let anybody tell you Stalin was stupid)

Of course, Stalin didn’t exactly mind it when his enemies thought that he was a dullard. Being underestimated can be quite useful….

While Jews were not targeted for collective punishment, plenty were caught up in the net of the purges.

That was true of any other ethnic group in the USSR. But Jews’ proportion at the GULAG was maybe half or less than other ethnic groups’ portion. (Interestingly, Russians were also over-represented.) And most other ethnic groups were less well represented among the ones carrying out the purges. Eventually Jews were purged from the NKVD, but by that time the USSR had already murdered maybe 90% of its victims.

And of course Jewish religious and cultural life was destroyed – nothing that was not co-opted by the Communist Party could be allowed to exist.

The same was true of any other ethnicity, including Russians.

He hated those who didn’t appreciate his intellect. He had a huge inferiority complex among the quasi intellectuals and literati who made up the higher echelons of the Bolshevik Old Guard.

I believe the fictional belief system to which you allude is commonly known as “anti-Semitism.” But perhaps semen is somehow involved. They are a funny people. It’s interesting that Jews are so special that they get their own category within the general “racism” canard. This piece by Joseph Sobran is illuminating as to what anyone might possibly think they might mean when deploying that term.

http://www.sobran.com/fearofjews.shtml

I would doubt that you would have a genuine interest in learning the truth about the Judeo-Bolshevik slaughter and enslavement of the Russian people, but if you did I would recommend consulting RUSSIA’S AGONY by Robert Wilton, who was the Times of London correspondent in Russia at the time of the overthrow. It’s a book that’s oddly hard to come by.

It doesn’t help that Israel keeps assassinating the best Iranian nuclear scientists.

“The USSR lost the Cold War. But the USSR’s defeat was Russia’s victory.”

Yeah. I don’t know that much about this very interesting event (why is it that the end of the Cold War, probably one of the most important events of the last century, has received relatively little attention?) but is seems the outline is like this:

Gorbachev was “first executive President of the Soviet Union”.

Yeltsin was “First Secretary of the CPSU Moscow City Committee, effectively “Mayor” of the Soviet capital”. As such he was appointed to the Politburo. After a small Moscow demonstration (that wasn’t squelched), Yeltsin ended up voluntarily resigning his position in the Politburo, something that had never happened before. Yeltsin was demoted and made a deputy of the Russian state “committee for construction”. This apparently led to Yeltsin becoming an emergent leader of “the people” in both Moscow and the Russian state.

Gorbachev and Yeltsin apparently grew to despise each other. Gorbachev was head of the 15 state Soviet Union, but Yeltsin de-facto leader of the Russian state, the most significant state. When push came to shove, Russia seems to have found that they didn’t really need the Soviets and their multi-state federation. Nationalism at work?

This explains Stalin’s turn against the Jews:

http://www.faem.com/yockey/yok52.htm

To quote one of my favorite lines from an otherwise ridiculously liberal movie, The Paper: “I don’t live in the world, pal. I live in New (effing) York (effing) City.”

The good news about registering in one of NY State’s minor parties is you NEVER get called for jury duty.

He hated those who didn’t appreciate his intellect. He had a huge inferiority complex among the quasi intellectuals and literati who made up the higher echelons of the Bolshevik Old Guard.

My understanding is that it was a back and forth kind of thing. Yes, Stalin felt the need to burnish his intellectual credentials*, but he also exploited the fact that his enemies underestimated his intellect.

*e.g., Stalin’s intervention in the Marrist controversy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japhetic_theory

Razib probably has some thoughts on medieval Persian/Caucusus cultural mapping. He dove into it some a while ago. I’ve heard opposite claims on Shia influence as being a positive or negative thing. It seems really tough to tease out the shifting sectarian/ethnic/dynastic overlays of that area to get a picture of the intellectual life at a given period, particularly considering how much more complicated Islamic sects were back then ie. some conquerer would be from some splinter group of a particular Ismaili sect of a Shia school.

Russia today still has closed cities.

Why don’t liberals care about brain drain, by the way?

It comes up from time to time. Mostly they believe everyone is equal, and equally able to solve hard problems in algebraic geometry if YT can be shoved far enough out of the way.

here was a lot of petty anti-Semitic career discrimination in the USSR by 1973,

Proof?

Zionist propaganda dies hard.

Knowing who the originators of communism were and being in a communist country I would say they had a distinct advantage.

No, no. From the 1700s to the 1990s (at least) there was a big German minority in Russia. Very high-achieving, they taught the Russians everything about industry, warfare and science.

It is easy to forget how “uneven” Soviet science was. With a command economy, the Soviets could achieve something great when they focused on something particular. For instance, the USAF is currently using Russian rocket engines to launch USAF satellites and effectively hostage to using these engines, because the US has fallen behind in rocket-engine building know-how, although the billionaire rocket boys club is charging back and will likely change this in a few years:

“American-Made Rocket Engines Could Launch Air Force Satellites By 2019: Divest from Russia, with love”, Kelsey D. Atherton, Popular Mechanics, Mar 2nd, 2016. (This originally seems to have been a scheme to keep Russian rocket scientists well paid and not interested in working in places like North Korea or Iran.)

But the flip side was a lot of other sectors starved. In some areas, the Soviets were never even close to competitive. Sometimes they weren’t even in the game. I don’t know if it’s true, but they way I once heard it the fall of the Soviet Union _really_ occurred when the Soviet (Russian) military realized the Soviet industrial sector could not even compete with Taiwan in making microprocessors and weapon-related embedded computers.

A book worth reading if interested in this is “Inside Russian medicine: An American doctor’s first-hand report”, William A Knaus (with research assistance by Nicholas A. Petroff), 1981.

Annals of Internal Medicine, Book Review, Sept 1 1981:

“…tour physician for the U.S. Information Agency Travel Exhibition… Siberian city of Itursk… gastric bleeding… transfusions…

…The Soviet emphasis on quantity over quality results in some curious statistics…

…the Soviet Union has more hospital beds (3.2 million) than any other nation… wards are crowded… average stay is 15 days, as contrasted to our 5… technology is primitive… in 1975… 75% of the X-rays were unreadable. …85% of the profession… women…”

“INSIDE RUSSIAN MEDICINE: An American Doctor’s First Hand Report”, KIRKUS REVIEW, May 1st, 1981:

“…Armed with a knowledge of Russian and a medical degree, William Knaus accompanied an American exhibit on Outdoor Recreation on its lengthy Russian tour. As a result of firsthand travel to remote parts… extraordinarily knowledgeable about medicine in the Soviet Union. …

…The book opens with a real cliffhanger: the dramatic fight for life of a young American guide who underwent surgery for internal bleeding in Irkutsk (Siberia). In spite of repeated transfusions, his condition worsened. The story ends happily when the Russians, in an unprecedented gesture of compassion, allow a US Air Force plane to fly across Russia to evacuate the patient.

…well known that Russia produces an enormous number of doctors (many of whom are women vrachi–the lowest-ranking physicians), that medical care is free, and that all workers are entitled to 24 days of rest at workers’ sanitoria. Behind the facts, however, Knaus points to the serious lack of new equipment, the limited choice and inadequate supplies of drugs, the often unsanitary working conditions and the just plain blunt needles and sticky rubber tubing that must be used and reused. Because conditions are harsh, stoicism is encouraged. Patients are scolded for moaning and groaning; some surgery employs only local anesthetics; childbirth is largely unmedicated; folk medicine continues to thrive.”

I think this was the first sanctioned US military overflight of the Soviet Union. (C-130 medevac)

That’s right. Here below is from Nabokov’s SPEAK, MEMORY:

“The nephew of Ivan and the son of Nikolay was my paternal grandfather Dmitri Nabokov (1827–1904), Minister of Justice for eight years, under two Tsars. He married (September 24, 1859) Maria, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Baron Ferdinand Nicolaus Viktor von Korff (1805–1869), a German general in the Russian service.

In tenacious old families certain facial characteristics keep recurring as indicants and maker’s marks. The Nabokov nose (e.g. my grandfather’s) is of the Russian type with a soft round upturned tip and a gentle inslope in profile; the Korff nose (e.g. mine) is a handsome Germanic organ with a boldly boned bridge and a slightly tilted, distinctly grooved, fleshy end. The supercilious or surprised Nabokovs have rising eyebrows only proximally haired, thus fading toward the temples; the Korff eyebrow is more finely arched but likewise rather scanty. Otherwise the Nabokovs, as they recede through the picture gallery of time into the shadows, soon join the dim Rukavishnikovs of whom I knew only my mother and her brother Vasiliy, too small a sample for my present purpose. On the other hand, I see very clearly the women of the Korff line, beautiful, lily-and-rose girls, their high, flushed pommettes, pale blue eyes and that small beauty spot on one cheek, a patchlike mark, which my grandmother, my father, three or four of his siblings, some of my twenty-five cousins, my younger sister and my son Dmitri inherited in various stages of intensity as more or less distinct copies of the same print.

My German great-grandfather, Baron Ferdinand von Korff, who married Nina Aleksandrovna Shishkov (1819–1895), was born in Königsberg in 1805 and after a successful military career, died in 1869 in his wife’s Volgan domain near Saratov. He was the grandson of Wilhelm Carl, Baron von Korff (1739–1799) and Eleonore Margarethe, Baroness von der Osten-Sacken (1731–1786), and the son of Nicolaus von Korff (d. 1812), a major in the Prussian army, and Antoinette Theodora Graun (d. 1859), who was the granddaughter of Carl Heinrich Graun, the composer.

Antoinette’s mother, Elisabeth née Fischer (born 1760), was the daughter of Regina born Hartung (1732–1805), daughter of Johann Heinrich Hartung (1699–1765), head of a well-known publishing house in Königsberg. Elisabeth was a celebrated beauty. After divorcing her first husband, Justizrat Graun, the composer’s son, in 1795, she married the minor poet Christian August von Stägemann, and was the “motherly friend,” as my German source puts it, of a much better-known writer, Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), who, at thirty-three, had fallen passionately in love with her twelve-year-old daughter Hedwig Marie (later von Olfers). He is said to have called on the family, to say adieu before traveling to Wannsee—for the carrying out of an enthusiastic suicide pact with a sick lady—but was not admitted, it being laundry day in the Stägemann household. The number and diversity of contacts that my ancestors had with the world of letters are truly remarkable.

Carl Heinrich Graun, the great-grandfather of Ferdinand von Korff, my great-grandfather, was born in 1701, at Wahrenbrück, Saxony. His father, August Graun (born 1670), an exciseman (“Königlicher Polnischer und Kurfürstlicher Sächsischer Akziseneinnehmer”—the elector in question being his namesake, August II, King of Poland) came from a long line of parsons. His great-great-grandfather, Wolfgang Graun, was, in 1575, organist at Plauen (near Wahrenbrück), where a statue of his descendant, the composer, graces a public garden. Carl Heinrich Graun died at the age of fifty-eight, in 1759, in Berlin, where seventeen years earlier, the new opera house had opened with his Caesar and Cleopatra. He was one of the most eminent composers of his time, and even the greatest, according to local necrologists touched by his royal patron’s grief. Graun is shown (posthumously) standing somewhat aloof, with folded arms, in Menzel’s picture of Frederick the Great playing Graun’s composition on the flute; reproductions of this kept following me through all the German lodgings I stayed in during my years of exile. I am told there is at the Sans-Souci Palace in Potsdam a contemporary painting representing Graun and his wife, Dorothea Rehkopp, sitting at the same clavecin. Musical encyclopedias often reproduce the portrait in the Berlin opera house where he looks very much like the composer Nikolay Dmitrievich Nabokov, my first cousin. An amusing little echo, to the tune of 250 dollars, from all those concerts under the painted ceilings of a gilded past, blandly reached me in heil-hitlering Berlin, in 1936, when the Graun family entail, basically a collection of pretty snuffboxes and other precious knick-knacks, whose value after passing through many avatars in the Prussian state bank had dwindled to 43,000 reichsmarks (about 10,000 dollars), was distributed among the provident composer’s descendants, the von Korff, von Wissmann and Nabokov clans (a fourth line, the Counts Asinari di San Marzano, had died out).”

Cold war probably had more to do with how lousy the Communist society was.

WWII nukes, maybe. Counterfactuals are always hard.

A friend of mine told me that, it didn’t work. They took 8 years to call me but they did call me.

Granted I did the GOP…maybe I should have gone Libertarian?

Neither Russian, nor English variant of Wikipedia’s article about Koshkin
contains any indication that he was a Jew in any sense;
everything points to purely Russian origin. He graduated from Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, which, to the extent any analogy possible, is closer to MIT, than to Harvard.
I would expect such set of errors from “remhat” commentator, but not here.

FBI contracted with an Israeli firm to break the encryption on the San Bernardino terrorist’s Apple iPhone gets me wondering how much of the Israeli advantage in telecom software these days is due to KGB investments in sigint and codebreaking in the old days …

You fell for that commercial too huh?

“No, no. From the 1700s to the 1990s (at least) there was a big German minority in Russia. Very high-achieving, they taught the Russians everything about industry, warfare and science.”

It was German Mennonite communities (“Russian Mennonites”) who first planted significant amount of trees in the black earth chernozem soil of the Ukraine and introduced western farming methods there. They also developed the famous Turkey Red wheat that they latter introduced in Kansas, making Kansas a famous wheat state.

In the first half of the 1600s, the Thirty Years War reduced the German population by 25% to 40%, depending on location. There were many entire German communities willing to emigrate. Some countries that wanted to industrialize and modernize (Russia included) wanted these people, in particular the pacifist communities.

The affirmative action was not ethically based but was based on the level of education of your parents. If they were peasants or blue collar workers one could get extra points to be accepted at university. Understandably, the majority of Jewish children did not qualify. This process helped to reduce percentage of Jews in the intelligentsia “class”. As the affirmative action was producing results Jews were getting more antsy and wanted to emigrate (Slezkine).

Proportion of Jews in GULAG is a bad measure. Majority of the GULAG prisoners (estimated two thirds) were common criminals. Jews are traditionally underrepresented among this category. Additionally, after WWII a lot of the political prisoners were real or suspected Nazi collaborators. Not many Jews among those, either.

There is not question that Communism was good for some Jews. It was very bad for the majority of them though.

You must have left USSR when you were a child or a clueless young man. The reality was almost complete opposite.

A Soviet person expected to be able to enter almost any building without having to explain to anyone why he wanted to do so and without having to show an ID.

Most definitely not true! The entrance to practically all buildings with any function was restricted. I had to show an ID to enter most of the university’s buildings (MGU), to enter the dorm where I lived, to enter all three research institutes where I worked (none dealt with military/defense), all ministries (federal and local) and all manufacturing facilities. The list goes on forever.

Schools, factories, offices, stores, libraries, etc. were unguarded.

Only true for stores and libraries on your list. Perhaps you know the word “вахтёр” – one of the mass Soviet occupations for babushkas and dedushkas. It’s from German “wachte”.

The Kremlin was unguarded. You just walked in through one of the towers.

Not true. All Kremlin gates were always guarded. Which does not contradict the fact that on most days one could just walk in.

There were no “bad” neighborhoods. That particular restriction on movement was missing.

Of course there were. Not quite in the same way as in the USA but there were plenty. Not to mention common self-segregation by ethnicity in villages. No sane Volga German would come to live in the Chechen village in, say, Kazakhstan. Volga Germans had their own villages.

In the absence of self-regulating economic activity the propiska system may have had it’s positive sides but the execution was pretty still dumb, preventing scores of talented youngsters from contributing their best to the society. (Yes, many were able to beat it but many more were not, ending up in the middle of nowhere doing pretense-science or pretense-engineering).

Personal computers are an area where the USSR was far behind:

“The backwardness of the USSR in microcomputers (=PC’s) (and in
computers in general) is well known. While at the Start of 1989 there
were about 200,000 personal computers in the USSR, there were about 50
million in the USA (CPSR, p.11 [see Reference page for meaning of CPSR
etc.]). The Statistical Abstract of the US reports production of PC’s
in the US at a rate of a few million a year (see index under “personal
computers”). One must clearly understand what type of computers these
refer to. While many of the US computers are old and obsolete 8-bit
Computers, a much higher percentage of the Soviet micro’s are 8-bit.
While the US is currently going through a transition from 16-bit to
32-bit computers, the USSR is making the transition from 8-bit
machines to 16-bit machines.”

(http://www.lafn.org/~dave/russia/russiaPC.txt)

Thus the US has about 250 times the number of Soviet PC’s and the
US PC’s are (on average) a few times more powerful. We thus have over
1000 times the computing capacity of the USSR. However much of the US
capacity represents home computers often used for video games etc.
including old computers, which are seldom used, so a much higher
percentage of the US computer capacity is being “wasted” than for the
USSR where sometimes people work late at night in offices due to a
shortage of computers (reported on Usenet).

Due to inefficient and small scale production methods, Soviet
microcomputers are many times more expensive than for the US. For
example at the start of 1989 the cost of a new Soviet PC with only 56K
of memory cost almost 36 thousand roubles (retail, see CPSR p.13). It
is likely only an 8 bit model. However a price of only 3,000 roubles
is reported by the CIA (CIA p.5) for a similar computer so perhaps the
higher figure is a “back-market” price. In the US today, one may buy
an 8-bit computer like this for about $500 new and much less if it
were used. It is also reported (CPSR p.13) that one may need to wait
over a year in the USSR to get it repaired. The high price of
computers in the USSR indicates that there is a high demand for such
computers. ”

(http://www.lafn.org/~dave/russia/russiaPC.txt)

The professor clearly was right. Personal computers are practically not being produced in the Soviet Union today. An article in a central newspaper last year said it would be necessary to increase the quality of the design by a factor of at least 20 to 25 (sic!) to be able to put a PC on the market.

Gorbachev said in a recent speech that Soviet industry is producing unsatisfactory computers. “We have to look the truth in the eyes,” he said.

I think the truth is even worse. During my stay in the Soviet Union last year, I did not see even one Soviet-made personal computer. Scientists from several institutes told me that the prototypes of a small computer produced in their workshops were taken and demonstrated for the Central Committee to show that the situation is not so bad.

Seven months after my visit, the situation became even worse. On January 27, 1988, the Soviet Literaturnaya Gazeta devoted an entire page to the problems of the Soviet PC. The title? “Tommorrow Will Be Too Late.” Here are some quotes taken from the article: ” “it is a catastrophe. No more and no less.”
” “The situation is threatening.”
” “It is a tragedy in all respects:
in scientific progress and cultural development, in education where we were not a long time ago ahead. . . the gap is widening and we risk to lose a place among countries—leaders of the world community.”

“We have no choice: either computers—and a future, or without computers—and without a future.”

In fact, computers are a problem for the entire Soviet bloc. The attempt to create a PC in Soviet bloc countries has not been successful. The situation is more than desperate. In the scientific institutes of East Germany there is often only one old-fashioned personal computer (an 8-bit Sinclair Spectrum with 64K of RAM) for every 10 to 15 scientists. No one in the West would buy such an old-fashioned PC today. Sometimes these scientists must wait a week or more before they get a turn to use the computer for a few hours. Senior scientists there receive only 1,000 sheets of printer paper per year. In Hungary, PCs are being assembled almost entirely from imported parts.

I recently was looking through a volume of conference proceedings compiled from camera-ready manuscripts. The differences in the quality of the typesetting were striking. Papers from the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries were produced using techniques far more primitive than those of Africa and Asia.

No wonder the scientific institutes in the Soviet bloc are trying to get Western computers by any and all means. In spite of the Western embargo on such technology, large computers continue to be imported or smuggled into Soviet bloc countries every year. A Western colleague once told me his lab had just purchased a new VAX mainframe very cheaply and had gotten a good price for the old VAX. Why? The embargo on the old VAX had been lifted, and the supplier was anxious to sell them for exorbitant prices in the East.

(http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/9396/title/The-Crisis-in-Soviet-Computer-Science/)

“During my stay, I visited the computer laboratory of a school in Novosibirsk, where the children ranged in age from 13-18 years. It has not a single PC. A few terminals are connected by direct telephone lines to an old Hewlett-Packard computer at the local affiliate of the Academy of Sciences. A Polish made printer, looking like a prehistoric monster, is able to print (capital letters only) in the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. Except that it is permanently out of order.

The teacher told me the lab serves 150 to 200 senior pupils and several dozen pupils from the so-called “scientific circle”—students chosen to receive extra training in science. That means that four or five terminals serve some 300 people. The children learn to program in BASIC, ALGOL, FORTRAN and PASCAL. “The last language we are teaching only theoretically,” the teacher said. “We do not have a single computer where we could test it.” The teacher showed me a collection of programs written by the students. They were interesting, and they testify to the students’ knowledge and lively interest.

But why, I asked, are they stored in a box and written on cards cut out from a notebook? The teacher didn’t understand the question. “Wouldn’t it be more natural to have them stored in the computer?” I asked.

A very young boy came to help. “The memory is not big enough,” he said.

“How big is your memory?” I asked. We struggled to find a common language to describe memory size. After some discussion, I learned that the computer had 1 megabyte of memory.

During my trip, I carried a portable Toshiba 1100 Plus PC. It weighed 4 kilos and had at least 2 megabytes of memory. Thus, my little Toshiba had a memory twice as large as—and could process data much faster than—the one being used by 300 students in Novosibirsk.
Culture shock indeed. My shock only grew when, hours later, I shared my experience with a friend. “You have to take into account that the school you visited is a very privileged one,” he said. “You will hardly find, in computer technology, a betterequipped school in the whole Soviet Union.”

Another characteristic of Soviet backwardness is that only Western computer languages are used. Programming is done in Roman characters, which naturally leads to further complications for the production and installation of terminals, printers and keyboards. Soviet scientists obviously have given up any attempt to develop their own programming language using the Cyrillic alphabet. Thus, Soviet backwardness in software is even greater than in hardware, but it is not yet felt so much. Our colleagues in the East will understand their lack of software sophistication only when they have at their disposal more modern and faster computers.

When I told my Soviet colleagues about the rapid development of computer technology in the West—about CRAY supercomputers, laser printers, worldwide computer networks, electronic mail, modem communication between home and office, access to hundreds of data bases, instant exchange of letters and articles with colleagues the world over—they shook their heads in disbelief.”

(http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/9396/title/The-Crisis-in-Soviet-Computer-Science/)

Soviet computers at the top of the line were inferior to their Western counterparts, and the
military directed some of the best products away from the general economy.25 Indigenous
computer production was low, and in 1988 an estimated 40% of Soviet computers were imports,
with most software derived from “pirated” Western programs. 26 Imported computers are
undesirable because, although they might offer superior performance to Soviet designs,
depending on the model, there was no structure in place to support the users with software,
peripherals, or repairs. Printers, plotters, and external memories were particularly difficult to
obtain.

(http://digitalcommons.olin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=ahs_capstone_2006)

“…The head designer and engineer of the t-34 tank was a Jew (Mikahil Koshkin) and pretty much everyone says that this was the best tank of the war.”

There is an important “rest of the story” or backstory to this point, known to anyone familiar with the history of tank technology.

J. Walter Christie:

“…Soviet… trade front organization AMTORG managed to secure plans and specifications for the Christie M1928 tank chassis in 1930 using a series of deceptions. On April 28, 1930 Christie’s company, the U.S. Wheel Track Layer Corporation, agreed to sell Amtorg two M1931 Christie-designed tanks at a total cost of $60,000 US, with the tanks to be delivered not later than four months from date of signing, together with spare parts to the purchased tanks for the sum of $4,000. Rights were also transferred to the production, sale and use of tanks inside the borders of the U.S.S.R. for a period of ten years. The two Christie tanks, falsely documented as agricultural farm tractors, were sold without prior approval of the U.S. Army or Department of State, and were shipped without turrets to the Soviet Union. The Soviets later improved upon the basic Christie tank design, adopting its sloping front armor for its BT tank series of infantry tanks. The BT itself was further refined into the famous Soviet T-34 tank of WWII, retaining the sloping front armor design, now adopted for side armor as well.

Following favorable reports on observation of the Soviet activities, the British War Office arranged purchase of Christie’s last remaining prototype… The vehicle was dismantled sufficiently to meet specification as an “agricultural tractor” and so be exported. The removed parts were then shipped to the UK in crates marked as “grapefruit”. Christie’s design still had a number of faults that he had never addressed and though the general features were retained, the design was completely reworked to form the British Cruiser Mk III (A13)…”

“History of Soviet espionage in the United States”:

“…By the end of 1936 at least four mid-level State Department officials were delivering information to Soviet intelligence…

…Whittaker Chambers later testified that the plans for a tank design with a revolutionary new suspension invented by J. Walter Christie (then being tested in the U.S.A.) were procured and put into production in the Soviet Union as the Mark BT, later developed into the famous Soviet T-34 tank.”

The “lone genius” theory is often overblown about a lot of things. It’s probably another by-product of people’s minds being overexposed to the typical Hollywood plotline.

An oversight indeed but the numbers were small. I had two German classmates and while they had typical German surnames, both had “Russian” for ethnicity in the passport. My impression was that this was true for most Volga Germans.

If Orthodox Finnic people leave their traditional rural life, move to a university town and get themselves educated, they usually just consider themselves Russians. They already have Russian names, Russian customs, their language is already nearly russified and they’ve lived for centuries in areas where rural populations are Finnic but urban populations are Russian so there is no cultural expectation that they’d continue their identity if they move to a Russian city.

Estonians on the other hand will find Russian identity alien and will stick to their ethnic identity even if they work in a Russian city and switch to using only Russian in their life. I think most of the list (and not just Finno-Ugric peoples) is about that, you’re not seeing scientific success, you’re seeing identity preservation success – whether or not the identity is sticky enough that it survives moving to a Russian city and trading your traditional lifestyle for an urban professional life.

At the top of the list you mostly see peoples like Georgians, Armenians etc who are Orthodox but they are even older Christians than Russians and developed their identity separate from Russians, Balts who have a sticky identity from Protestantism, Jews who have the stickiest identity of all the world’s peoples, Caucasus peoples that I know nothing about but who I presume have other sources of “civilized” identity since the areas are relatively new additions to Russia.

By the way, Finns should appear on the list too. I assume we’re absent because we became a non-people in 1918 when the Whites won the Civil War here and World War II didn’t help things for ethnic Finns in the USSR. Some of the peoples closest to Finns like Karelians and Vepsians got treated very harshly by the Soviet government because of us and they would often hide their identity. I know a Vepsian (now in Finland) whose family had only been told in adulthood that they’re Vepsians because the parents only spoke Russian to their kids and never told them of their roots so that they wouldn’t have to live with the stigma. I don’t think politics with Finns ever influenced the treatment of more distant Finno-Ugrians like Mordvins, Udmurts etc, though.

Poles are another old minority of Russia that has somehow gone missing.

FWIW, Russian small arms are quite simple and quite effective. My 2 rubles…

Russia is an empire. Kinda like the PRC. They expand, contract, have internal fights and change their names every now and then.

Koshkin was Russian, not a Jew.

Amusingly, the Wikipedia page on the BT series has this to say:

Christie, a race car mechanic and driver from New Jersey, had failed to convince the U.S. Army Ordnance Bureau to adopt his Christie tank design. In 1930, Soviet agents at Amtorg, ostensibly a Soviet trade organization, used their New York political contacts to persuade U.S. military and civilian officials, to provide plans and specifications of the Christie tank to the Soviet Union. At least two of Christie’s M1931 tanks (without turrets) were later purchased in the United States and sent to the Soviet Union under false documentation, in which they were described as “agricultural tractors.” (Empasis added)

TheLastinDecay said:
“The ethnic Russians were even more formidably gifted before almost the entire intelligentsia and aristocracy were liquidated by the Jews.”

Ed said:
“This is some anti-Semetic revisionism. Jews were both the liquidators & the liquidated during the Soviet era.”

Actually Ed, Soviet Communism was a Jewish movement. The very first law passed after the Bolsheviks took power was to make anti-semitism an offense punishable by death.
Originally, the upper ranks of the Party were 50 % Jewish while Jews comprised only 2% of the total Russian population. The heavily Jewish leadership murdered upwards of 30 million Christian Russians and Ukranians using the most brutal methods imaginable. They also detroyed churches, while allowing jews to retain their own schools and cultural centers and the yiddish language.

It is wrong to equate Stalin’s later purge of several hundred Jews from the Party in the late thirties, without placing it in the context of their earlier history. Stalin realized he was being played when he said ‘”we have too many Abramoviches”.

There is a distant possibility that you confused Mikhail Koshkin (1898-1940), who was known for T-34, Kharkov plant,
with Josef Kotin (1908-1979), known for KV-1, KV-2, KV-85, IS-2, Leningrad, Kirovskij zavod, 1937-41; Chelyabinsk tractor (read: tank) factory, 1941-1946, then back in Lenngrad.
KV and IS were heavy tanks, while T-34 was medium tank.
Kotin was born Jewish, but had nothing to do with T-34.
From 1968 a Jew Kotin was deputy Minister of Defense Industry of the USSR.
For your excuse: both last names, Koshkin and Kotin, mean “of cat origin”.
I actually knew a person, who (for a short time) worked in Chelyabinsk with Kotin.
Sill, your arrogance surprises me.

The women who were called “doctors” in the Soviet Union were more like nurse-practitioners in the US.

Generally speaking, resources were devoted mainly to things that had military applications and the consumer goods sector was atrophied. The typical pattern is that they would buy/steal technology and machinery from the West, open a factory with it and then never update it. So, when they started producing the VAZ-2101 (sold in the West as the Lada) in 1974 it was based on the (then) recently discontinued Fiat 124 and was more or less up to date. But when the last VAZ-2106 came off the line in 2005, it was decades out of date.

Christie’s suspension was so wonderful that he could never get the US Army to buy it.

Soviets (and especially Stalin) always had an exaggerated idea of how good Western technology was and a distrust of native technology (which was in fact quite good when they put their mind to it) so they always preferred to buy/steal/license Western technology wherever possible and then modify it to suit Soviet conditions. The most amazing was the TU-4 which was a completely reverse engineered rivet for rivet copy of the B-29.

“No, you really don’t get it.”

“It was literally beyond your imagination.”

No, it is not beyond my imagination; I can imagine it perfectly well. What makes you an expert on my imagination? And you did a bit of change-up there. We ere talking about the Soviet Union, by which I understood that to mean late Soviet Union – that is rather different than Stalinist Russia. Did you live in Stalinist Russia? I rather doubt you did. If not, what makes your imagination so superior?

There is a story that the first copy the Commies made of the B-29 was accurate down to the flak hole in the aileron of the captured aircraft.

I apologize for this “ad-hominem”.

But Google translate says:
“reiner Tor’ means in English “pure fool”.

Could that explain your difficulties with time?
You wrote.

“….rumored that Stalin planned a huge “anti-Zionist” operation and show trial before he died, but he actually killed only maybe 500 during the actual anti-Zionist operation and trial..”

and then
“…..All the while ….their proportion among the higher echelons of the party and especially the repressive apparatus was much higher than their proportion among the general population until well into the late 1930s ……”

What in heavens justifies the phrase “All the while” when you juxtapose events from 1952 (anti-Zionist operation) with events from 1938 (higher proportion in the repressive apparatus).?

You could have written: Till 1938 they repressed others; By 1952 came their time to be repressed.

Just a wild guess here, but “cat” names could originate in the very common Jewish family name Katz (which is “cat” in German/Yiddish).

Germany had no margin for error due to both strategic stupidity of Adolf Hitler — fighting the British and Soviet Union at the same time with the US certain to enter — and the lack of any logistical capability unlike the British who had centuries of experience of moving men and supplies around the globe.

However, had they been Jewish friendly, in some alternative universe, they very likely would have retained a great many talented physicists and engineers, with the possibility being they could have married the V2 rocket with an atomic warhead. Of course had anyone else than Hitler run Germany there would have been no war at all.

Of course, both the USSR and Germany lacked a broad industrial infrastructure married with a lot of talented technical people. The success of Oppenheimer at Los Alamos rested on lots and lots of talented technicians and engineers which quite likely is the failure point of the Iranian nuclear program. Iran does not according to published reports lack for money, energy, or enriched uranium. They do seem to lack qualified technicians able to deal with the 17 different change states of Plutonium alloy required for an implosion bomb. Which is the only one that can be fitted on a missile and thus practical for an arsenal.

It is important to have talented physicists and scientists — the British survived 1940 and 1941 on their radar technical expertise and code breaking. It is equally important to have skilled technical people and resources so a nation can actually do something with that expertise.

The Soviet Union’s failure was just the failure of the Czars writ larger — the Czars tried to industrialize while keeping central control and the model of the Big Man randomly killing Boyars to keep power which Stalin and successors basically emulated.

Thanks, I suppose what you are saying is quite right, and given the policies encouraging assimilation in both the Soviet Union and Russia, the Finno Uric people who stick to their culture are mostly rural folks who would not have gone to university in the first place. Estonians beat the trend by having an important urban population

Arrogance? What are you some kind of weirdo? This is not the UN and you are not the Soviet representative discussing capitalism. Yes I mixed up the IS and KV with the t-34. The point stays the same comrade. The Jews were well integrated into the Soviet defense establishment as designers etc. nothing wrong with it, that was the country they lived in.

In Russia, most Germans who immigrated were referred to as Volga Germans – while many Germans obviously took jobs in the big cities, they were, numerically, the exceptions ( Kuchelbecker’s dad is the most interesting from the point of view of civilization – Kuchelbecker being one of the few contemporary poets Pushkin fully admired). The high-profile city Germans intermarried with the local female talent (as described in the almost-sadly- amusingly-self-regarding Nabokov excerpt quoted at length by a previous commenter), whereas the bucolic Volga Germans stayed more to their own kind (and there is no reason to expect them to have been any more evident at the higher levels of Russian science than to expect, say, the Pennsylvania Dutch to punch their weight at the higher levels of scientific achievement in 20th century America). As for Koshkin, he was clearly Christian by birth, but was probably a little on the Asperger side of things and just not philosophically bright enough to adhere to an unpopular religion when the anti-religion scoundrels took political power. His Dad had a Russian name (Ilya) that, unlike most common Russian names (e.g. Pyotr, Vladimir, Ivan) was also a common Jewish name. He also looked Jewish (his pictures look more like, say, Jeff Goldblum or Kirk Douglas than John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart). He also worked in a candy factory when young (while confectioners were usually Russian in the Russian empire, that was nevertheless a field where Jews were not discriminated against much). His name is basically Katz,or more accurately Katzschen, which, without doubt, is more often Jewish than Russian, however you translate it. On the other hand, his mother had a completely Christian name and he gave his children Christian names. So he was of course not Jewish, but it is not ridiculous to note that he had many Jewish attributes. To put it in American terms, probably slightly less Jewish than Goldwater but way more Jewish than Kennedy. Also, that was and is one impressive tank. Not good to die from a cold at 41 , but one hopes he said his prayers before he died, and, from most points of view, that was a life well spent. Finally, the 1970s stamp in his honor is a classic; one of the best designs of the late Soviet era.

could originate in the very common Jewish family name Katz (which is “cat” in German/Yiddish

Is this like Wood Allen’s “Oedipus Wrecks”, the character of which quizzed his mom on going to see the musical “Cats”, “What business do you have with Mr. Katz?”

I am told by the most reputable source (ahem, Wikipedia!) and corroborated by a Near Eastern history scholar and rabbi that the family name Katz is a German simplification of Kohen Zedek as in descended from the priests serving in Solomon’s Temple.

“Amusingly, the Wikipedia page on the
BT series has this to say…”

Appearances can be deceiving, but it’s interesting to compare this picture of a BT-2 from that page (caption: “The BT-2 tank of 1932 was the first Soviet modification of Walter Christie’s design.”) with pictures of the Christi tank design. Here’s a pic of a real Christie tank. And another.

Christie seems to have been trying to concentrate on design of high-speed penetration tanks, without paying much attention to things like weapons; perhaps long-range high-speed tanks were of interest to the Soviets, who expected to be fighting in central Asia against the Japanese (and soon were)?

That page notes the Soviets didn’t convert the BT to metric until the BT-3.

By the way, Koshkin could also be Tannerson (the son of a tanner), which obviously would not translate as Katz or Katzschen. And while the 1970s stamp commemorating the tank designer can be criticized for the color choice, such criticism would be wrong – the retro brown used looks ugly to most of us, but to an average Soviet in the 1970s it was achingly reminiscent of the inexpensive colors used in the overwhelmingly tragic 1940s.

Dear old Germania, where have your clever ones gone? What have you done for us lately?

The University of Berlin’s proud list of Nobel Prize Laureates.
In the fields of chemistry, literature, medicine and physics:

Chemistry

Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1901

Emil Fischer
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1902

Adolf von Baeyer
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1905

Eduard Buchner
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1907

Richard Willstätter
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1915

Fritz Haber
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1918

Walther Nernst
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1920

Peter Debye
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1936

Adolf Butenandt
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1939

Otto Hahn
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1944

Otto Diels
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1950

Literature

Theodor Mommsen
Nobel Prize for Literature 1902

Medicine

Emil von Behring
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1901

Robert Koch
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1905

Paul Ehrlich
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1908

Albrecht Kossel
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1910

Otto Warburg
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1931

Hans Spemann
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1935

Werner Forßmann
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1956

Physics

Wilhelm Wien
Nobel Prize in Physics 1911

Max von Laue
Nobel Prize in Physics 1914

Max Planck
Nobel Prize in Physics 1918

Albert Einstein
Nobel Prize in Physics 1921

Gustav Hertz
Nobel Prize in Physics 1925

James Franck
Nobel Prize in Physics 1925

Werner Heisenberg
Nobel Prize in Physics 1932

Erwin Schrödinger
Nobel Prize in Physics 1933

Walter Bothe
Nobel Prize in Physics 1954

Max Born
Nobel Prize in Physics 1954

Don’t know how many of these great minds would have been purged by Nazi Aryanization. It’s probably wrong for me to focus on the brightest lights of all the millions of innocents who perished, but I can’t help thinking about how much of Europe’s human potential and extraordinary talent were lost to the catastrophes of the 20th century that were either murdered or scared into exile.

If all the aspiring political activists, revolutionary vanguards and SJW crusaders would just put down their megaphones and roll up their sleeves and humbly join us in the labs, we might actually change the world and beat cancer or develop practical fusion power… Perhaps we all can’t be geniuses, but you don’t need to be an Einstein to contribute to the team.

Excuse the ignorance about how the antisemitism worked in the USSR, but was the bias against Jews explicit or merely a consequence of revolutionary policy that aimed to mix up the classes? From what I’ve been told by some people who lived in the former communist regimes, the offspring of humble workers and farmers were given significant preferences to study and join higher professional and academic careers while at the same time the children of more elite professions were barred or hindered from studying at all… to compel them to join their comrades in the proletariat. A peculiar form of affirmative action they followed. So it’s easy to imagine that even without explicit anti-Jewish policies that a class based favoritism of the humblest farmers and workers would have the same effect of discriminating against the children of a Jewish intelligentsia.

He made the same mistake with Geim. Looks like a trend.

[Jewish religious and cultural life was destroyed]

What a shame! It meant the Jews in Russia couldn’t replicate their extraordinary scientific achievements prior to 1860, when the Russian state didn’t interfere at all with their “religious and cultural life”.

On the topic of Soviet Jews, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast was a rather intriguing endeavor. Stalin set up at Zionist state within the Soviet Union in the extreme Far East bordering China.

Things did not exactly work out. There is much to admire about the Russians, but when they screw up, they tend to do so in spectacular fashion. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast is today less than 1% Jewish. Interestingly, its official flag is the Rainbow Flag.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast

I’m thinking that, too. The 1973 data would have counted established scientists. If you subtract 10-40 years from that and you’re into WW2, Stalin, and the purges. The Estonian’s national elite was largely liquidated or deported after the Soviet takeover in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact. There was another wave of deportations starting in 1949. It was a bad time to be a Ukrainian intellectual when the Soviets took over, the Nazis invaded, and then the Soviets returned to power, and it wasn’t a very good learning environment for their children, either.

OT-

New York Times Magazine has a feature on The New Europeans in a small German town.

The comment section is shockingly critical of Merkel’s immigration policies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/magazine/the-new-europeans.html

I am surprised that Steve hasn’t busted out his Rick Moranis Ghost Busters joke that he wheels out every year or two. I can see him looking at all those names of peoples that we Westerners have no familiarity with, all with their own little tribal vendettas and subtle differences, and he is just salivating at the potential to use that joke again. I don’t think it ever gets old.

Without question, all American politicians (Ron Paul might have been the exception, but he’s retired, and the son is not the father) are socialist to one extent or another. Bernie Sanders is more socialist than the average Democrat but less so than quite a few.

The actual amount paid out to “welfare bums” is dwarfed by the administrative costs and infrastructure to do so and by corporate welfare programs, of which most defense spending incorporates a healthy swath of. Most military contracts are heavily loaded with pure corporate welfare.

Right. We can test Steve’s hypothesis against the data.

Test: If Israel excels at cryptography companies but does poorly in other tech areas, then the hypothesis will pass the test.

Result:  Israel has more startup companies per capita and more scientific papers published per capita than any other country. https://web.archive.org/web/20140925022720/http://www.jfns.org/page.aspx?id=43769

We already knew that data, so why hasn’t it been brought up yet in this thread? Because statements that are “off-narrative” slide out of our memory as if we never read them.

Lots of great science is being done in Germany. Max Planck Institutes are a formidable network. On a whole, Germany’s most science metrics (citation impact per published paper, etc) are higher than in the USA. Two relatively recent immigrants from Germany won Nobels – Blobel in 1999 and Sudhof in 2013.

I’d be interested to know how the Russians asked for your papers?

“Papers please” or “Papers!”.

The Kalashnikov is arguably the most idiot-proof automatic rifle in history, as evidenced by its successful use by idiots all over the world for decades.

The Hind helicopters also seemed more fearsome and tougher than our Apaches.

Otto Warburg was mentioned in Ron Chernow’s book about the Warburgs. I think he may have been the only Warburg who stayed in Germany throughout the war. He got some special dispensation from the Nazis. The book also said he almost won a 2nd Nobel Prize.

You’ve got to be pretty butthurt to not admit that Jews contributed to over half of the atomic bomb.

Every first world country combines elements of capitalism and socialism. In fact, you could argue that some combo of both is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for first world status. Of course, you also need a certain level of human capital.

“There was a lot of petty anti-Semitic career discrimination in the USSR by 1973”

My BS meter is pegged, Jews ran the joint and didn’t have a fallout in the USSR till the 6 day war

Depended on what it looked like your status was, just as anywhere else in the world.

Germany is also producing some info tech startups these days. Maybe the best known today is Sound Cloud, but I interviewed Albert Wenger recently ( http://seekingalpha.com/article/3963382-conversation-one-worlds-leading-venture-capitalists ), who is a German immigrant venture capitalist, and he talked about another interesting one started by mechanical engineering students at the Technical University of Munich, Sim Scale.

Quite a number of Jewish scientists spied for the Soviet Union against the US.

“The Hispanic population is expected to reach about 106 million in 2050, about double what it is today, according to new U.S. Census Bureau population projections.”

In 2050 America, there will be more Hispanics than Germans and Italians combined. Latin America has been the largest source of immigrants from Non English speaking countries to The U.S.

That was that except when they gave Jews a special impossible to pass version of the test.
http://www.tanyakhovanova.com/coffins.html

What is your point? That Soviet repression of religion was a good thing?

That it was a good idea, and the Jews’ own idea, to abandon their “religious and cultural life”.

Has anyone read Solzhenitsyn’s book on this subject?

Ruthenians?
Rusyns?

Nothing?

The group is best known for its US member, Andy Warhol ( nee Warholya)

Please advise
@stevesailer

The ethnic Russians were even more formidably gifted before almost the entire intelligentsia and aristocracy were liquidated by the Jews.

Most of the liquidated or expelled intelligentsia and aristocracy was ethnic Russian in name and culture but with significant German, Swedish, Baltic, Polish and Tatar ancestry in their genetic make-up. Pure ethnic Russians, i.e. descendants of serfs, are not particularly intelligent.

On balance the movement of people was freer within the USSR than within the US of that time

.

Maybe less surprisingly, Glossy is also ignorant about the US during the Cold War. There was very little security in the America of the 1960s and 70s relative to today. I lived in DC in the 1970s and as kids we would just walk into the Capitol to ride around on the Capitol Subway, that linked the Capitol with the Senate Office building. There was no security at all.

Why no Russians of German descent in the list? Obviously, I’m aware that after WW2 they suffer discrimination in the Soviet Union, still they were a quite numerous and educated people (one famous recent scientist of such descent is Andre Geim, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics) Was the reason they were not officially regarded as a minority? Were they counted in official statistics as Russians?

I must confess I am ignorant of many of the peoples of Siberia. Some of the peoples you cite above, like Yakuts and Buryats only appear as names in my memory as people that were defeated then assimilated into Ghengis Khan’s Horde. To find out they still exist…amazing. It is like finding out that there are a million Pygmies.

Does anyone know of a good book of the peoples of Siberia and their history?

Precisely correct.

The Ladas of the 8Os and 9Os were nothing more than unimproved 1974 Fiats.

And this is the sort of thing any layman could verify for himself.

Has it ever been published in English?

Yep, I am old enough to remember when you could use the stairwells to go to another floor in an office building if you did not want to wait for the elevator. That ended when some of the vibrants starting robbing people in the stairwells. Now the doors lock behind you and you have to go to the ground floor to get out.

To answer my question, it seems not, but a translation of parts is available:

http://www.sunray22b.net/200_years_together.htm

Ah, it’s the anthropology of a butthurt Polish gentleman of the 1860s, preserved in aspic till the present day.

There are about half a million Yakuts in the world, not exactly a small tribe. They are a Turkic people and they live in the Sakha Republic, an autonomous republic in Northeastern Russia that is the largest subnational governing body by area in the world with more than a million square miles, larger than Argentina and only slightly smaller than India.

The USA is an empire. Kinda like the PRC. They expand, contract, have internal fights and change their names every now and then.

FIFY.

That label applies much more so to the USA than to either Russia or the PRC today.

Libya delenda est.

I responded but my response was not published.

I responded but my response was not published.

Katz = Kohen Zadek?

It is not strange at all. Jewish literary talent in America has been exhausted in the effort to disguise the name Cohen of which you may find in the New York Telephone Directory no less than twenty-four variations: Cohen, Cohn, Cone, Cunn, Curie, Coan, Coon, Cohene, Cane, Kohn, Kohne, Kohen, Kohene, Kuhn, Kuhne, Kun, Kunn, Koen, Konn, Coone, Cahn, Kone, Kann, and Kahn.
From: http://vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres9/ROTHforever.pdf

“You’ve got to be pretty butthurt to not admit that Jews contributed to over half of the atomic bomb.”

Note sure how you measure half. Would they have achieved anything without DuPoint and Union Carbide?

“On the topic of Soviet Jews, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast was a rather intriguing endeavor. Stalin set up at Zionist state within the Soviet Union in the extreme Far East bordering China.”

The only flat-out trained Soviet secret agent to penetrate the Manhattan Project and he apparently got just about everything:

George Koval:

“…According to Russian sources, Koval’s infiltration of the Manhattan Project as a Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye (GRU) agent “drastically reduced the amount of time it took for Russia to develop nuclear weapons.”

Koval was born to Jewish immigrants in Sioux City, Iowa, USA. Shortly after reaching adulthood he traveled with his parents to the Soviet Union to settle in the Jewish Autonomous Region near the Chinese border. Koval was recruited by the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate, trained, and assigned the code name DELMAR… returned to the United States in 1940 and was drafted into the US Army…

…his parents left Sioux City as the Great Depression deepened… Abram Koval became the secretary for ICOR, the Organization for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union… the Communist answer to Jewish emigration to the British Mandate of Palestine then being undertaken by the Zionist movement…

…Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology … graduated with honors… Koval was recruited by the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate…

…his handlers decided to have him work under his real name… returned to the US in 1940, replacing a spy recalled during Stalin’s purges…

…transferred to the Army Specialized Training Program, a unit established in December 1942 to provide talented enlistees with an education and technical training. Koval attended the City College of New York (CCNY) and studied electrical engineering. …selected for the Special Engineer Detachment… part of the covert project to design, engineer, and fabricate an atomic bomb…

…made a “health physics officer”… job as a health officer meant ….access to many sensitive areas…

…first Soviet atomic bomb was detonated on August 29, 1949. The initiator for the plutonium bomb was, according to Russian military officials, “prepared to the ‘recipe’ provided by military intelligence agent Delmar [Koval]”…”

…In Russia, he left the Soviet military with discharge papers as an untrained rifleman and the rank of private. …Koval apparently went unscrutinized for years…

…Koval’s activities as a spy began to emerge after the publication of a 2002 book, The GRU and the Atomic Bomb… posthumous title of Hero of the Russian Federation bestowed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

It must have been interesting to have been an undergrad, secretly already having the equivalent of a masters degree.

Proportion of Jews in GULAG is a bad measure. Majority of the GULAG prisoners (estimated two thirds) were common criminals.

Well, it is important to bear in mind that the non-criminal percentage did see some rather large spikes from time to time (e.g., the collectivization/dekulakization campaigns in the early ’30s, the ’37-’38 Great Terror, etc)

He deserved it. Hauken is one of the–many–leftists responsible for this insanity, and bringing pain, suffering–including lots of rape–and death to Norway … forever. Boiling in oil would be too good for this sort of leftist trash. Rape by some piece of Somali garbage is only small payback for his crimes.

I feel sorry for the innocent Norwegians who did not want this, voted against it … but have suffered and seen their country destroyed by the likes of Hauken.

In a just universe Hauken would be raped to death in Norway, then raped by Somalis in hell … forever.

Otto Heinrich Warburg (/ˈvɑːrbʊərɡ/; October 8, 1883 – August 1, 1970), son of physicist Emil Warburg, was a German physiologist, medical doctor and Nobel laureate. He served as an officer in the elite Uhlan (cavalry regiment) during the First World War, and was awarded the Iron Cross (1st Class) for bravery. Warburg is considered one of the 20th century’s leading biochemists.[2] He was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1931.[1] In total, he was nominated for the award 47 times over the course of his career.[3]

Warburg’s father, Emil Warburg, was a member of the illustrious Warburg family of Altona, and had converted to Christianity reportedly after a disagreement with his Conservative Jewish parents. Emil was also president of the Physikalische Reichsanstalt, Wirklicher Geheimer Oberregierungsrat (True Senior Privy Counselor). His mother was the daughter of a Protestant family of bankers and civil servants from Baden.

In 1935, Hitler had a polyp removed from his vocal cords. It is believed that afterwards, he feared that could develop cancer, which may have allowed Warburg to survive. In 1941, Warburg lost his post briefly, when he made critical remarks about the regime but a few weeks later a personal order from Hitler’s Chancellery ordered him to resume work on his cancer research. Göring also arranged for him to be classified as one-quarter Jewish.[4]
According to the Reichsbürgergesetz from 1935 (cf. Nuremberg Laws) Warburg was considered by the Nazis a half-Jew (Halbjude) resp. Mischling and in September 1942 he issued an official request for equal status (“Gleichstellung”) with Germans which was granted.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Heinrich_Warburg

“I’m thinking that, too. The 1973 data would have counted established scientists. If you subtract 10-40 years from that and you’re into WW2, Stalin, and the purges. The Estonian’s national elite was largely liquidated or deported after the Soviet takeover in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact.”

Kenneth Christie, Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in Eastern Asia and Northern Europe: Ghosts at the Table of Democracy (2002)
Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonians (1940-41): 85,000 deported, of which 55,000 killed or died
Baltics executed during reconquest (1944-45): 30,000
Postwar partisan war
Lithuanians: 40-50,000 k.
Latvian: 25,000
Estonians: 15,000

Am I reading this correctly: 3,244 Jewish scientists per 100,000 people, general population? If so, we have USSR population in 1970: 242,000,000

Let’s divide by 100,000 to see how many 100,000-strong groups are there.
242,000,000 : 100,000 = 2,420 groups, 100,000-strong each.

Now, each such group can boast of eg 3,224 Jewish scientists. And so we have:
2,420 x 3,224 = 7,802,080 Jewish scientists in all groups, or in the entire 1970 population.

Now, cannot find the size of the Jewish population in the 1970 USSR. But was it higher than 7.8 million? I doubt it.

The religious made up a significant minority of the Soviet Union prior to break up. In 1990, the religious makeup was 20% Russian Orthodox, 10% Muslim, 7% Protestant, Armenian Apostolic, Georgian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic, less than 1% Jewish and 60% atheist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Union

Yes, the Soviet scientific forte was theft.

Stephen King thinks the Berlin wall was designed to keep out immigrants!

King’s one of those super-Yankee weirdos whose heart and soul are still stuck in the sixties. Probably because Maine is so white, so it’s all theory to him, and hey, it sounds great on paper. He does write incredible stories for a living, so fantasy isn’t exactly outside his wheelhouse.

He seems unusually strident in his ignorant stupidity, though.

And yet the country has been as few as three months away from having the Bomb for years now.

Funniest bit is to contrast North Korea with Iran. Iran says it’s not building a bomb and has been negotiating with the Hussein administration, and the establishment is constantly in hysterics about them. North Korea carries out nuclear tests, and the establishment says they’re fake and the North Koreans don’t have any nukes. Then the North Koreans say they’re developing a missile that can strike the US, and the US establishment yawns.

***

I wouldn’t crow too loudly about Russia’s demographic situation. Right now they’re “enjoying” the West Virginia advantage, which everyone in history has left behind as soon as possible. Let’s see how Russia does when she’s prosperous, with low corruption.

On balance the movement of people was freer within the USSR than within the US of that time.

If you weren’t in a Gulag or a shallow grave with a bullet in the back of your skull, it was a great place to visit.

The US government/establishment disagrees.

The ghost of 1979 is still alive but it’s time to move on for the US establishment. There’s plenty of evidence that suggests Iranians aren’t that into their religion or their leaders(especially the latter) but the US still wants to be friends with “other” nations around the Persian Gulf.

If they could do a deal and trade locations with the North Koreans, maybe that would help.

A minute ago you were telling us how open everything was in the SU. Which is it?

Whatever, as long as it sounds good (to the current audience).

The Kalashnikov is arguably the most idiot-proof automatic rifle in history, as evidenced by its successful use by idiots all over the world for decades.

AK is also easy for idiots to mass produce.

You’ve got to be pretty butthurt to not admit that Jews contributed to over half of the atomic bomb.

And an anti-semite if you find yourself reporting the fact to lefties too often.

Has it ever been published in English?

I assume we’re talking about 200 Years Together? If so, WNs are still in the process of translating it (last I heard it wasn’t done yet, but mostly so, IIRC). Very likely has more WN readers (in English) than not. Seems the overlap between “Russia expert” and “Jew” has its price…

What is the effect of World War II especially for the Baltic Nations (and, maybe, most of all for the Estonians). Very large proportion of “nationalist” intelligentsia was killed or deported (by the Communists and by the Nazis) during or after the War. Also very large proportion of the middle class and educated professionals escaped. This was especially true in Estonia, where it was relatively easy to take a boat and sail to Finland or Sweden. This happened often in 1944. Many Estonian refugees and their descendants became quite successful in Sweden. Think about Svante Pääbo and his Estonian refugee chemist mother. In 1973 this great decimation of Baltic intelligentsia would still be recognizable in the USSR: if you were a 30 years old young academic in 1943 and decided to flee you would still be active player in science in 1973.

A Lada, a Yugo and a Trabi drive off a bridge.
Which one hits the water first?
Who Cares!

Majority of the GULAG prisoners (estimated two thirds) were common criminals.

I have to concede that’s a good point. I’d add two points to support my (now somewhat weakened) view that Jews were underrepresented among the victims of communism.

One is that the classification is not always easy, and especially under the circumstances of early Communism Jews were not necessarily underrepresented among the victims. For example black market activities were nonpolitical crimes, and I suspect Jews were rather overrepresented among black marketeers. While black marketeers might have become legal businessmen in a normal country, I still don’t think they really were victims of the system whose laws they willingly broke for personal profit, though it’s largely a semantic question. Stealing from state property was usually considered a political crime (by the authorities), while it was almost always nonpolitical in nature. Also, some of those who were sentenced to several years for stealing from socialist (state or kolkhoz) property were, in an ultimate sense, political victims of a regime that took all their belongings and was intent on starving them to death. But that, too, is a semantic question.

My second point is that I only used GULAG prisoners as a proxy for all types of victims. Among victims starved to death, Jews were certainly vastly underrepresented. Among victims shot (a minority of those killed), Jews might have been overrepresented, but the majority of those shot in the late 1930s were “former kulaks” (among whom there were virtually no Jews). Jews might have been overrepresented among the rest of the victims, for example a small minority of those shot were high ranking party or military officials, and among these categories Jews are almost certainly overrepresented. (Of course, these were victims of a system they themselves helped create and served enthusiastically until it turned on them.) There were many nonpolitical professionals and intellectuals killed, and among those Jews were almost certainly vastly overrepresented, too. But as a percentage of those shot, these were few.

So I have to revise my views in that by the late 1930s Jews might actually have been overrepresented among some types of victims. (Especially after 1939 when Jews were definitely overrepresented among those deported from the Baltic states and Eastern Poland. It must be noted that they were also vastly overrepresented among the perpetrators of these deportations, since a lot of local Jews joined the Party and the Soviet security organs.)

There is not question that Communism was good for some Jews. It was very bad for the majority of them though.

Communism was bad for the majority of any ethnic group, especially if we check long time periods. Ultimately for example Nazism proved to be very bad for all Germans, basically without exceptions. In fact, shortly after 1945, most Germans believed that they were victims, too, or, somewhat frivolously to us, that they were the real victims, much like how Rolling Stone Jackie’s real victims are the women who won’t ever be believed again when they cry wolf.

But was communism that bad for Jews in general until maybe the mid-30s? Masses of them were moving into the big cities from which hitherto they had been banned. They occupied a lot of very high positions in the government and the economy. They occupied their rightful place (or maybe a little more) in the arts, for example I read that when Stalin’s anti-Jewish (“anti-Zionist”) campaigns started, almost all theaters in Moscow had Jewish directors. Anti-Semitism became illegal (again, until maybe the late 1940s), in fact, it became proof of someone’s counter-revolutionary leanings, and so it was quite dangerous to express anti-Semitic sentiments – it cannot be bad for the Jews. And they were the ethnic group that was most quickly modernizing, and so leaving the religion of its ancestors – it also means they were the least affected by the anti-religious drive of the regime (again, often led by ethnic Jews). For a while even the Yiddish language was endorsed by the authorities and Yiddish language books and publications were springing up (much like how until maybe the early 30s the use of any minority language was encouraged).

“You’ve got to be pretty butthurt to not admit that Jews contributed to over half of the atomic bomb.”

I didn’t say they didn’t. I said that european refugees were not indispensible (or even heavily represented) in building the bomb. Certainly Jews played an outsized role in the development of the bomb which, given thier outsized representation among physicists, is not surprising. Were they “over half” to use your characterization? I don’t know. Neither do you. You’re just pulling a number out of your ass. I rather doubt they were over half.

Given that you seem upset to have your casual and uninformed biases deflated by an actual consideration of actual numbers – I’d say it’s you that appears “butthurt”.

The reason Communism was attractive to many (but by no means all) Russian Jews to begin with was that it promised to be free of racial discrimination, unlike the Czarist regime. Of course, in order to be a Communist you had to give up observance of your religion, so there was a trade off.

The fact that traditional Russian anti-Semitism was able to reassert itself starting after WWII was a sign that the ideological fires of Communism and Internationalism had gone out and from that point until the end of the Soviet Union they were (like the Communist parties in China, Cuba and Vietnam today) merely cynical mafiosos concerned only about power, who no longer believed their own BS and merely used the cloak of ideology to lend legitimacy to their rule in the name of the “workers”. The Chinese Communist Party says that they have “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and in effect the late Soviet Union had socialism with Russian characteristics (anti-Semitism, excessive alcohol consumption, etc.)