Melvern, Linda; Nick Annin; David Hebditch;
Techno-Bandits : How the Soviets are stealing America's High-tech Future
Houghton Mifflin Co, 1984
topics: | russia | history | business
The forgotten story of how, after WWII, a large number of complete high-tech factories as well as personnel were relocated from the occupied zones, West and East, The Germans devastated Russia - from Ukraine upto the doors of Moskow and Leningrad. In their scorched earth retreat, they went through territory where 40 percent of the Soviet population had lived... no fewer than 20 million people died. 33 Under the agreement between the Allies a quarter of German industrial capacity, now sited in the U.S., British and French occupation zones, was packed up and handed over to the Soviets. Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary were stripped of metal foundries, petrochemical plants, mining and heavy engg assemblies. The Soviet-occupied eastern zone of Austria lost $400 mn in equipment and plant. Separate peace treaties with Rumania and with Finland contained contained clauses covering the relinquishment to the USSR of equipment estimated at $600 million. And in the Far East, following the defeat of the Japanese forces, Manchuria was stripped to the tune of nearly $900 million in industrial machinery. - p.34, notes #4 The world's first artificial satellite was no more than a tiny short-wave radio transmitter linked to a thermometer and powered by a set of flashlight batteries. But from two hundred miles above the earth, and travelling at a speed of 18K mph, its message was clear enough - the Russians had a lead in the missile and space race. 35 Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov (1907-1966), was the head Soviet rocket engineer and designer during the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike his counterpart in America, Wernher von Braun, Korolyov's pivotal role in the Soviet space program was kept a closely-guarded secret until after his death. Throughout his period of work on the program he was known to the people outside of the space industry only as the "Chief Designer". A victim of Stalin's 1938 Great Purge, he was confined for almost six years, including some months in the notorious Kolyma gulag in Siberia. Following his release, he became a rocket designer and a key figure in the development of the Soviet ICBM program. He was then appointed to lead the Soviet space program, overseeing the early successes of the Sputnik and Vostok projects.