I tend to reject any narrative about the Soviets which makes them not sound like humans. They weren't all idiots or sociopaths: they understood, just like we do, that people make mistakes and that if you punish mistakes too harshly, people won't want to risk working with you. The Soviet government punished dissent harshly--but if you were working with them they weren't typically so foolish as to punish honest mistakes with a stay in the gulags. In fact, technical fields like their space program (and, for example, infrastructure programs) were safe havens for intelligentsia, where some criticism of government was tolerated because it was understood that criticism from people with technical knowhow was necessary to progress Soviet goals.
There are exceptions I've found, but I tend to think those are the result of a few people with too much power making bad decisions, rather than a pervasive cultural norm.
None of this should be perceived as a defense of Soviet totalitarianism. Stalin has the highest body count of any dictator by a wide margin, and that's totally reprehensible. All I'm saying is I think he killed political dissenters, mostly, not allies who made mistakes.
E.g. movie Tenet starts from depicting a scene from "Russian life": under a low sun, in freezing cold, dirty hungry Russians are crawling in the dirt gathering "pieces of Uranium" with their bare hands.
Or you can open just about any publication/movie about Russia/Soviet Union from just about any period of time: there would be not a single good word. Western Media almost never publishes something like: "There's a new school/hospital/stadium/factory opened in Russia". Instead all you can see is "Russian corrupt government officials set a record of eating 100500 babies alive today.", "Weak Russian economy means that Russians will survive on a diet of two rotten potatoes a day in 2026", etc. etc.
It's just that Soviet period is demonized the most.
Basically nobody in the west has any idea, and people always assume I was in a hell hole the entire time. It’s wild what propaganda will do for knowledge of a place.
The rest of the world having to clean up the mess left by the Soviet Union (paying for the cleanup and decommissioning of nuclear submarines, Chernobyl, rebuilding eastern Europe) may have a lot to do with the anti-Soviet attitude.
Have you ever wondered if maybe that (and by extension your attitude to it) is part of the problem?
Your very own directors depict it this way, mainly Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev or Stalker.
https://theconversation.com/why-vladimir-putin-still-has-wid...
This isn't just oppressed society afraid to act. This is actual support for the actual killer of the babies. Despicable.
Some of it is also caused by the pervasive hostility to the values important to most humans, pervasive disinformation efforts, and aim to destroy the peace and integrity of the countries it perceives as a competition.
For now I'll just agree this is largely deserved, and I'll play the sad tune on the tiny violin.
Would you blame them? Who cares is something good happens now in Russia while they are brutally murdering their neighbors?
Nobody cares whether Hitler was great at drawing or not.
He executed and imprisoned a bunch of his best aircraft designers. Look what he did to Andrei Tupolev and his design bureau; they designed a whole aircraft in the Gulag: https://vvsairwar.com/2016/10/20/aviation-design-in-the-gula...
Right, it's time we stopped this stereotyping and looked at this objectively. The Russian Empire and later the USSR has had many, many truly brilliant people over recent centuries. The list of names seems endless, here are few immediately to mind: Chebyshev, Cantor, Markov, Borodin, Köppen, Landau, Cherenkov, Mendeleyev, Tolstoy, Shostakovich, Gagarin, Prokudin-Gorsky, Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky. And here's just the Wiki list of Russian scientists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_scientists. Now, there's much more, do the same again for physicists, mathematicians, chemists, composers, writers, novelist and so on. When one looks at the sheer numbers of people it's hard to believe that they all come from Russia.
Morever, it's hard to imagine where the world would be today without these brilliant people. It's almost inconceivable the world would be anywhere near the same without them.
I'd like to think most of us are smart enough to separate the majority of Russians from the small minority of ratbags, sociopaths and psychopathic, paranoid, sadistic monsters such as Stalin, Putin and Ivan the Terrible. There is no doubt that Russia has had a long and terrible history of tyrant rulers whose reign of tyranny has caused great harm to the Russian people. If anything we ought to feel some sympathy and compassion for the Russian population as a whole given the centuries-long turmoil Russia has endured.
Nevertheless, in spite of its long history of adversity Russia has still been able to produce this brilliant body of people and it's done so essentially consistently over recent centuries.
Give credit where credit is due.
Sergei Korolev, a famous Russian rocket designer (who was later responsible for launching a first satellite and first human space flight), had to go through the prison and labour camp. In 1938 he was head of a laboratory for jet propulsion (mainly for development of weapon), and as jet engines were not well studied, experimental models often failed with explosions. After another failed test, several laboratory employees were arrested, and after they testified, Korolev. They were charged with sabotage - creating a secret anti-Soviet organization with the purpose of weakening Soviet defence. After series of interrogations, during which he had his jaw broken, he admitted the guilt and soon was sentenced to 10 years of work in labour camps [1]. The sentence was later reviewed and he was transferred to a prison where he was allowed to continue working on jet propulsion.
Another example is Andrey Tupolev - Soviet aircraft designer ("Tu" series of planes is named after him). He was also charged with sabotage (conspiracy to slow down aircraft development in USSR) and espionage during Stalin times and had to design his planes in a prison [2].
After Stalin death, both Korolev and Tupolev cases were reviewed and they were admitted not guilty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev#Imprisonment
It was worse than that. He was beaten with rubber hose and wire harnesses, had needles pressed in the body, was urinated on. He then was sent to a gulag where he was left dying from hunger and scurvy. He was saved by a fellow imprisoned engineer who was fortunate to fight his way up though the inmate hierarchy.
The broken jaw, out of the many broken bones in his body is mostly mentioned because it was ultimately the cause of his death in 1960s.
