Rrerku

Despite the high bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, some design bureaus still achieved spectacular feats in science and engineering (mostly in defense and aerospace) e.g. Mir space station, Soyuz rockets, Mil V-12, Caspian Sea Monster, Antonov 225 Mriya etc.

Free flow of ideas and criticism are important for innovative ideas to be realized. How did the scientists in these bureaus manage to innovate despite Soviet censorship and bureaucracy. Take for example a scientist disagreeing with the head of a design bureau on a certain design prototype. How was such criticism handled? Or was the best design prototype chosen from a scientist who had more political connections.

The USSR didn't tend to go in for economic competition, but it made good use of intellectual competition and competition for prestige. It was also relatively good at creating organisations that did a specific thing, and kept on doing that.

The competition between the MiG and Sukhoi fighter design offices, for example, was quite significant, driven by rivalry and prestige. They designed pretty good aircraft for far less money than the Western aircraft companies, and kept on doing it until the fall of the USSR meant that the money supply dried up.

In the same way, the OKB-1, OKB-52 and OKB-586 design offices competed fiercely, with different ideas of how the space and missile programmes should be organised. Political influence was important in these rivalries, but it wasn't measured on a single scale, and the virtues of designs were also significant.

The heads of design bureaus were engineers themselves - that was how you achieved distinction as an engineer in the Soviet system, by getting to start your own design bureau - and the politics inside a bureau seems to have been more restrained.

The system had some definite flaws. One of them came when one ministry's organisation needed something that the relevant ministry did not produce.

For example, one of the problems with the unsuccessful N-1 moon rocket was the excessive weight of the first stage. That was because the USSR did not make aircraft-grade aluminium in thicknesses greater than 13mm. That wasn't thick enough to make a first stage whose outer skin was also the wall of the propellant tanks. So the tanks had to be spherical to make them stronger, and the rocket needed a separate outer skin for streamlining. That weight disadvantage meant that all kinds of other things had to be pared to the bone, the rocket needed extra stages, and things got harder and harder from there.

Another flaw was that the system was pretty top-down. If the government wanted a better version of something that already existed, or knew it wanted something new and had a reasonable idea of what it wanted, that need could be met. Discoveries and entirely new inventions coming up from the bottom had a harder time than in less controlling systems, and political acceptability mattered a lot there. Lysenkoism was an extreme example. It was entirely wrong, but so politically acceptable that it became official doctrine for over thirty years.

The USSR did do some science for its own sake, but this worked best in mathematics and mathematical physics, which are fairly cheap to run. Talented people in those fields also tend to be quite dedicated.

Genuinely like John Dallman's answer, but I'll add some to it:

• Outside of Party political games, one way to live a better life in the USSR was to hold a position prized by the Party. And something that was very much rewarded was anything that allowed the Communist system to get ahead of their enemies in fields that could lead to military advances. So it tended to attract bright people.




• WW2 probably did an excellent job of weeding out excessive political criteria in judging which design bureaus were worthy of backing. Pretty much any tank that was not T34-based at the start of the war wasn't getting made much later on, so there was some ruthless pruning. If anything, they were much more disciplined at cutting off flakey systems than the Nazis. Later on, new tank families got added, but they never went back to the menagerie of weird tanks that they had in 41. The AK-47 was designed by a "random tank guy", for example, so they had mechanisms to recognize good work.




• Russian scientists and engineers could be brilliant. Given resources they could get pretty good results. And remember that they could access Western publications too - https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol1no4/html/v01i4a05p_0001.htm , which also mentions some things about internal Soviet science publications.




• At the end of the day, whatever the USSR managed to have as spare resources (after essentials and corruption) tended to be assigned to technical fields allowing scientific, industrial and military competition against the West. So they could throw lots of capacity at these type of problems. Including nurturing an education system that pushed clever people into these fields instead of say, becoming lawyers or doctors.

It wasn't always rosy. I seem to remember that Stalin didn't believe in those new-fangled electric computers but recognized the potential of machine-based calculator engines. So he pushed pneumatic logic gates (this is similar to his rejection of Mendel's work). They never quite recovered from that.