> the prisoners themselves called sharaga (or sharashka in its diminutive form), a word derived from a Soviet-era slang expression meaning a sinister organization based on bluff or deceit.
while it somewhat nuanced, wikipedia provides better sense of that word (specifically the "sinister" above doesn't sound right)
Etymologically, the word sharashka is derived from a Russian slang expression sharashkina kontora ("Sharashka's office", which in its turn comes from the criminal argot term sharaga (шарага) for a band of thieves, hoodlums, etc.[1]), an ironic, derogatory term to denote a poorly organized, impromptu, or bluffing organization.
Well that's translation and localization for you. The end result is always filtered through the personal biases of the translator. Although to some people evil and criminal might be same thing as well.
Once I watched a documentary about US nuclear and space programmes, the way engineers lived and worked there in forties cannot be directly compared to sharashkas but the military and the government still limited the engineers (especially germans and jews) in many ways.
There is a recent (2009) edition of the same book titled In the First Circle which includes chapters which were removed for the first edition (The First Circle, published 1968). Anyone interested in the title should also consider listening to the two EconTalk podcast episodes relating to the book.
I'm in the middle of _In_the_first_circle_ right now and really enjoying it. I also got turned on to it from econ talk. Highly recommend reading this book!
It appears to me that a rigidly controlled organization, like the Sharashka seems to have been, is actually a pretty effective way to reach a well-defined objective. For example, reverse engineering something, or "make us a thing like those people over there have". The reason the Soviet Union and China (when it was actually communist) could do well at catch-up, but not as well when it was time to move into the lead, was that it is not a good system for researching or engineering new things, because in that case you need to try a lot of different things and see what works.
The Soviets dominated mathematical research; the West only caught up when the government collapsed and the Soviet mathematicians emigrated to the West.
It is logical that freedom is required for innovative scientific progress - and nice to think so, because it means that the free inevitably become more powerful, and defeat tyranny. A built-in safety device. e.g. Einstein, escapes nazis, leads to atomics (though to his regret). If the nazis had accepted everyone, they would have been more powerful... though, I guess, not nazis.
I haven't read your link yet, but I understand soviet maths developed more-or-less in parallel isolation, with some innovations on both sides - about what you'd expect. Non-isolation would have yielded greater progress.
It would be news to von Ardenne et al to hear that they were Soviet, and their input to Soviets' "pioneering" space travel is at least as important as von Braun's to American space program.
Von Braun not only succeeded in getting German researchers to USA, but headed a major space program when the need arose. Participation of German rocket specialists in Soviet space projects was more modest - first, the level of expertise wasn't quite the same as in von Braun's team, then they didn't really collaborate with Soviets as information was going only in one direction. At some point Korolev felt that Germans became less useful than their absence - given that Germans didn't have the feedback from their proposals, how it affects the work of Korolev's team. Then the German group's work was done.
So, I don't think von Ardenne - who worked on nuclear projects, not rocketry - or other German participation is as big as what von Braun's team has achieved.
Don't forget that while Americans got von Braun and his brains, Soviets got not only von Ardenne (who was quite bright anyway) but also everything from rocket (and other) factories) that wasn't nailed to the floor. Whatever was nailes has been moved together with floors.
By all indications, von Ardenne worked on quite a few projects, and it is quite interesting that the Soviet Moon project that ran when Germans were allowed to go home, ended in nothing much more than a few spectacular explosions.
No, Soviet Moon project had a list of successes and firsts and I would estimate was about 80% complete when it was closed. You don't launch a 100+ meter high rocket four times in 1970s, with the fourth time up until to thrust terminating sequence of the first stage, and call it a few spectacular explosions. The list of spinoffs is too numerous to list - Block D derivatives still fly, NK-33s still fly, Proton... Soyuz spacecraft... and it would be hard for one person with level of distrust which Germans had in post-war USSR to affect such a program to a scale of singular importance. Von Ardenne left USSR for East Germany in 1954 when works on - hugely successful - R-7 didn't even start, and Soviet Moon project was closed in 1974 - there definitely was some time to move development ahead.
There certainly was enough time, but they never made it to the moon. These days, though, there is a nice cottage industry of "moon landing was a hoax" experts, with one of main arguments being "hey, even we couldn't make it".
No, the time was rather short. Americans made it by 1969 with almost no time to spare, and they arguably had more both time (USSR started working on the moonshot some years later) and resources (the same team which worked on N-1 also worked on strategic missiles). That's not to mention the whole point of JFK plan - to raise the bar high enough so USSR would be unlikely to get to the finish line first. JFK's advisers calculated time right.
The point where we started was that Soviets pioneered the space travel and remained - up no now - comparatively quite good at it. I'd attribute that both to good decisions made at the foundation of the industry - and to lack of commitment to space advancements on the West especially after Moon race and end of Cold War in general.
I completely agree with the latter point, but while Americans have no problem admitting that von Braun was instrumental to the US space program, Soviets never even mentioned von Ardenne's name anywhere (just like it has never been mention that Hugo Schmaisser just happened to be a war trophy at the factory where Kalashnikov worked).
Of couirse it's not like SOviet space rocketry ewxisted in a vacuum, completely separate from ballistic missiles either. Gagarin's rocket basically was one of the early ICBMs. Once they realized that making copies of B-29 will only get them so far, they threw all the effort into rockets instead. Space program was a side-effect.
It was not a secret in USSR that Germans participated in early post-war rocketry works. Boris Chertok - in post-Soviet memoirs - describes works of team of Herman Grottrup. I'm not sure von Ardenne had that much influence on space-related technologies. Soviets rather have hidden their own projects, trying to paint too rosy a picture of a string of successes.
Orbit-capable rockets were for a long time being developed for military goals, it was only governments which can afford them and governments had their own justifications. In USA, for example, a lot of military rocket technologies found their way into civilian NASA programs.
In post-Soviet memoirs, indeed. Of course Chertok would know who worked there. The general populace only heard rumours that possibly Guderian was teaching in a military academy and was convinced that of course Tu-4, Elbrus, the Bomb, rockets, AK-47 and all that were purely homegrown inventions.
At least after Stalin's death they stopped claiming that pretty much everything has been invented or discovered by Russians (with an occasional Ukrainian or Uzbek thrown in for good measure).
>As Sergei Korolev was said to have joked, the guards who protected him in his high position as the chief designer of the Soviet space program were probably the same ones who watched over him in the sharashka.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and came to a conclusion that because of the fact that in communist/socialist society of Soviet Union money couldn’t buy you things you wanted, government really struggled to motivate people.
That’s why they resorted to intimidations, threats and physical abuse to force people to perform, as soon as propaganda couldn’t bring the needed motivation anymore.
In the west a lot of people work hard because they anticipate some big reward in the end. In Soviet Union, even celebrities lived like peasants, only party leaders had more than others.
>money couldn’t buy you things you wanted, government really struggled to motivate people.
What money could not buy, your position itself provided. There were queues and there were priorities built in.andit wasn't just party leaders. There was different housing for scientists in fields important for state, for security employees and sometime for army officers and there were nice percs for trusted people who were able to visit conferences abroad and buy nice things there. There were people sailing abroad and they brought contraband with them, which they sold on black market.
You could have used your position to ask for retirement and dacha in a nice place on the south if you were in kgb, instead of Frozen Ass Oblast'.
All of that plus a credible threat of violence for perceived dissent worked for a while.
It's somewhere in between working for large corporation and living in a really large prison. You obviously could bend some rules and things you are not supposed to have.
You can rely on humans to turn pretty much any form of political organisation into a hell of corruption, nepotism, status-seeking, short-term exploitation, and resource rationing.
You can also rely on humans to protect their own interests and stop criminals, but they must be allowed to do so. You have to have a system where the masses who are hurt by corruption have a chance to fight against it, if all power is held by the central party you will see the negative aspects of human nature while the positive aspects are suppressed.
While money weren't useless, being close to right people was absolutely necessary prerequisite. Also, one couldn't earn enough money simply by good engineering anyway. So the arguments stands.
I'm in the middle of Strugatsky brothers' "Probationers" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Apprentice - which paint another picture of motivation than this. Strugatsky brothers are foundational to Soviet sci-fi literature just as Alexander Solzhenitsyn is foundational to Soviet opression literature.
This is directly contradicted by the article - they mention imprisoned scientists and engineers proposing what eventually becomes a sharashka themselves. I think where your logical chain falls apart is the assumption the purpose of the oppression was motivation. The purpose of the oppression, though, was actually just oppression.
No, not well, just better than the nobodies in the same system. Plenty of things were unavailable to anyone. For example, you couldn't own a good car, no matter who you were. A party boss could use a luxurious government dacha, but could not leave it to his children because he did not own it.
> you couldn't own a good car, no matter who you were.
Well, theoretically you can. But you have to be a really high on the ladder.
Brezhnev had several good _imported_ cars. Gagarin had a sport car (gift from French, I believe). Vysotskiy (think of a Soviet Elvis Presley) had a good car.
But other 99.99%... no chance.
Of course, I'm not taking into accounts hundreds of "expropriated" German cars which appeared in USSR after 1945.
It wasn't impossible to get a good car - just quite hard. My grandfather was just an ordinary steel plant worker, who was so good, that he got a short term contract in Egypt and earned enough hard currency to buy one of the first Volga's in the city (a white one, because black was reserved for party apparatchiks). He was not even a member of the Communist Party, on the contrary, when he was young he was conscripted for a forced labor as German ethnic minority.
Well, after his first ever space flight, Yuri Gagarin was granted, by the order of the Soviet government, among other things, several pairs of underwear. That should tell you all you need to know about how well even celebrities lived in the USSR.
Sure. But just to think -- a few sets of underwear were something that would be considered among things that you need to have gifted by the government, along with a car or a house.
Can you imagine John Glenn being presented with some underwear in the White House?
I don't quite see what's wrong with that part of Gagarin's award. Maybe some items could be of higher comparative value in USSR than they were elsewhere. Military uniform is usually provided by government, and it's not far from that to some element of underwear. What does it mean, in your opinion?
Only that it wasn't some martian silk underwear embroidered with gold and unobtainium threads. Just regular underwear, but even that was something that your regular Soviet citizen had great trouble finding. I can believe that those were of a higher quality than goods provided for regular citizens (elites in the USSR always had access to higher quality, and usually cheaper, goods) but seriously, isn't there something wrong with a picture where a country spends billions on a vanity project but can't even make it so that a well-paid fighter pilot can just go and buy himself whatever underwear he wants?!
Decent underwear was not that easy to find even in the 80's.
There certainly are reasons for space exploration. In a country where a year after Gagarin's flight army shot unarmed civilians who were demonstrating asking government to give them some food, it is far harder to justify.
There's definitely something wrong with the picture, where a small part of reward is taken as a proof of something. For a single flight Gagarin got more than $100k in today's money, plus a house, a car and some clothing including underwear which was more like a supply than a reward.
Umm, no, I think it is the other way around (it's not like it were a lifetime supply of underwear, although even that would have been pretty weird). There is definitely something wrong with a picture where several pairs of underwear are listed together with a car, house, etc., as a reward (yes, reward) for extraordinary achievement.
The other problem being, of course, that whether you were given $100K, or a million, you couldn't really go buy a car or a house anyway. And, apparently, underwear or a decent coat either.
Even a Volga, which was rare in private hands, was not as good as a Western car of the time, and there was (I think) only one model of each brand and a total of four (4) brands of cars you could buy.
It's not the point. They lived better than others because of their loyalty (or sometimes, simply proximity) to "dear leaders", not because of their outstanding skills.
Leo Trotsky, for example, wrote that Soviet state should exploit its workers to attain its socialist goals, with hopes that at some point things would go sufficiently well that they will no longer feel exploited. If it never happens, too bad.
Stalin forced him away but he never had any other policy.
Fast forward to 1990, nobody wanted to be a part of Soviet state to lift a finger to keep it whole. And we're talking high ranking officials, army and state security here.
while it somewhat nuanced, wikipedia provides better sense of that word (specifically the "sinister" above doesn't sound right)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka:
Etymologically, the word sharashka is derived from a Russian slang expression sharashkina kontora ("Sharashka's office", which in its turn comes from the criminal argot term sharaga (шарага) for a band of thieves, hoodlums, etc.[1]), an ironic, derogatory term to denote a poorly organized, impromptu, or bluffing organization.