Conversely, when my parents visited Moscow in 1975, many locals offered to trade goods to get their Finnish tourist map of Moscow; since it was more detailed than the local maps they had access to.
When Napoleon invaded Russia, one of his big problems was that he couldn't get maps of Russian roads; there were no such maps.
simne•4mo ago
What impressed me, maps of own territory was usually intentionally distorted and have lot of mistakes, even when WWII, many Soviet officers used German maps.
At the same time, looking on mass information industry, have seen interest things - when there was not nearly any information about local enterprises and science (except clearly seen propaganda), but in few top magazines we constantly seen not much delayed info about US and Western Europe tech.
Also, existed constant stream of top technologies, bought from West via black schemes.
As example, of such stolen technology, in early 2000s happen scandal, when free press opened info about Cray-Y-MP used by Ros-hydro-meteorology (RosHydroMet) state entity (it appear in financial report of entity, as equipment for which need budget to pay for maintenance), when it was prohibited to sell to exUSSR by sanctions.
Unfortunately, soviets don't seen value in gaming technologies like C64/Atari/NES video accelerators, but copied many professional Western machines like IBM/360,PDP-10, Mips-R1000 (as I hear, up to R4000), 8086/8088, most of 74 series and many support chips (from Intel).
For about 8088 even appeared rumors, it was copied semi-smart - looks like coping team got crystal with defect, and they really decoded microcode, but under pressure of Soviet tops, included in masks definitively non-working part (with defect), so under microscope Soviet clone looks nearly exactly like US original.
simne•4mo ago
So what I want to say, Russians are very creative in doing weapons and doing harm, and they are really serious threat for West.
villedespommes•4mo ago
Nuclear and chemical weapons, artillery were invented by West. The US remains (hopefully continues so) the only country that used the nuclear weapons against another country. All defunct European powers routinely engaged in slave trade, drug trade, ethnic cleansing (in very inventive ways sometimes as the Americans nearly exterminating the entire bison population which was the main food source for Native Peoples).
motorest•4mo ago
...and yet, Russia today is overtly and unapologetically engaged in genocide and ethnic cleansing in it's invasion of Ukraine, not to mention what the regime has been doing in other regions such as Georgia.
If you seriously had a problem with whataboutism involving the US and Europe, you'd be seriously pissed at what Russia has been doing for over a decade. But here you are, making excuses to whitewash Russia.
riehwvfbk•4mo ago
Also, you may want to look up the definition of genocide. The parts of Ukraine that Russia took are almost 90% Russian ethnically.
Somehow you don't hear any calls for Ukraine to return the parts of Poland that were attached to it by Comrade Stalin either. They've been a part of Ukraine for barely longer than the parts of Russia where the fighting is happening.
So yeah, whataboutism.
simne•4mo ago
- In 1940s, USSR totally resettled all Crimean Tatars to Siberia, and only in 90s they got permission to return home. For comparison, imagine US will resettle all people from Florida to Alaska - you will not name this genocide?
And yes, resettling of peoples, was typical for USSR, and Russia was main power in USSR, even when prime ministers was from other parts of Union, so demography policy was pro-Russia. For example, up to 1990s, Russia constantly resettle Russians to Eastern Ukrainian regions, and same way, now Kazakhstan, and other Asian exUSSR counties have large share of ethnically Russian population.