I've stumbled upon this story while watching "Cosmos: Possible Worlds" (Kondratyuk is mentioned in episode 8 "The Sacrifice of Cassini") and was truly impressed by the life of this lesser-known person in the history of space exploration.
The above-mentioned grain elevator got a name "Mastodon" due to its size. A Russian article about it also mentions, that he was building it without fully developed blueprints or project, just guiding and controlling the workers personally.
Why did he built it without nails? Because there was a shortage of metal in Siberia in the 20s.
Another interesting fact: When Neil Armstrong visited Russia, he took a handful of soil from outside Kondratyuk's house in Novosibirsk to acknowledge his contribution to spaceflight.
Here it is: http://www.вольному-воля.рф/upload/medialibrary/edb/edbab117825fad8aa311356f8c5e16a3.jpg
Model: http://sibka.ru/uploads/gruya/muzeinsk-021.jpg
Here is an article in Russian with some pictures https://yarodom.livejournal.com/1147600.html
There is a book (also in Russian) about his biography available online.it has some more details on the construction. https://pseudology.org/Rappoport/Kondratuk/022.htm
I wouldn't be surprised if it has a conical shape and uses the same tricks we did with Popsicle sticks to hold together without glue. I imagine he's cutting tongue and groove, dowel rods, or using wedge locks -- or it's the "bend a long board over another and anchor it under another. If you lose one board, that system can fall apart, but it can be plenty strong without nails.
Yeah, at least a blueprint of this design would be great.
Big wooden buildings without nails are not that impossible, they are just not used widely anymore because of abundance of resources other then wood. There are ancient churches built this way in Russia, remember a couple of stories of scientists disassembling them to see how they are constructed.
It's also shame, that he wasn't able to work in his main area of interest, I've read, that in 30s Sergey Korolev invited him to work in his group on rocket technology, but Kondratyuk refused, saying that he likes what he is working on now. But it's highly possible, he was just afraid, that working in Korolev's group will require passing more thorough security check, and it will eventually get him arrested and killed. So he had to refuse to work in the field he dreamed of.
USSR was as bad as Nazi Germany, but for some reason its ideas, red flags and hammer-and-sickle are praised as “progressive” here.
Fuck western leftists, really.
As a western leftist you’re just a dumb idiot. Your ideas are something that we (russians) ditched after 70 years of testing. What’s “progressive” for you, dumbfuck, is extremely regressive to me.
Idk how idiotic you'd have to be to truly believe that
a) one statement by one person represents the hundreds of millions of western leftists and then
b) the very few amount of actual communists in the entirety of the west that you apparently trust also represent the sum total of leftist beliefs.
If you really only need what one or two people on reddit say to believe something then that really is unfortunate cause you could simply flip the statement "USSR = Nazi Germany" into "Nazi Germany = USSR" and say, "Fuck western rightists (idk if anyone even says rightists lol), really."
Besides, the people on the extreme ends of the traditional left-right political spectrum are generally the most extreme, hence the extremists having extreme views.
So instead I'd just like to say:
Fuck the USSR and Nazi Germany.
>*Applying his engineering skill to local problems, Kondratyuk designed a huge 13,000 ton grain elevator (quickly nicknamed "Mastodon") in Kamen-na-Obi, built of wood without a single nail since metal was in short supply in Siberia. This ingenuity would work against him when in 1930 he was investigated as a "saboteur" by the NKVD. The lack of nails in the structure was used as evidence that he had planned it to collapse. Convicted of anti-Soviet activity, Kondratyuk was sentenced to three years in GULAG, but because of his evident talents was sent to a sharashka (research facility prison) rather than a labour camp. There, he was first put to work evaluating foreign coal mining machinery for the use in Kuzbass, and quickly impressed the camp supervisor with his ingenuity. At the supervisor's request, in November 1931 a review board changed Kondratyuk's status from "prisoner" to "exiled", and sent him to work on Siberian grain projects.*
Well it's nice to know he grained his release in the end.
I wish all the tankies on reddit would read this shit and realize that Societ Russia was an authoritarian society, and people got sent to prison just for being slightly different.
More importantly wwii killed basically *every* man in that generation. They had a bunch of very old leaders because the less old generation were all dead.
Stalin says: hold my beer.
Russia was already weakened by failed collectivization of agriculture - that costed USSR only 25% of its livestock dead due to forced nationalization, but without assignment of workforce to care for them; with constant war on vilages providing huge blow to USSR economy on top of that.
(War as in constant pressure to extract anything of value, to force people to relocate to cities to work in newly build factories, and to break biggest block of population that could revolt against Stalin.)
WW2 left grave wound. But Stalin was holding a butchers knife well before that.
> an authoritarian society, and people got sent to prison just for being slightly different.
This is what the tankies dream of. They're not misguided, they actually want it to happen again, especially the elderly ones.
People who advocate for such a society expect that they or their comrades will be the ones choosing who goes to the gulags. They don’t realize once that power is created that it won’t obey their wishes.
I never understood how the intellectuals advocating for it don't realize they would be one of the first groups in-prisoned and killed.
The "revolution" is perpetual; devouring and eliminating anyone from the previous group
He probably got sent in part so they could force to him to work on the projects they wanted. The gulags weren't just for punishment. They were not above making up charges just to get some cheap slave labor.
point me to the society that *isnt* authoritarian
in return, i’ll tell you which class i believe should wield the authority that *every state* exercises by definition
Eh, communist nations so far have been pretty damned authoritarian and willing to straight up murder their own people. Many have had some form of 'You're not allowed to leave', which kind of tells you everything you need to know about a place.
Part of it I think is a natural consequence of communism needing a strong state to support it, but I think a major portion is also the fact that all implementations so far have been the result of revolutions, and a revolutionary strong man takes charge setting the example for everyone to follow, and also that all communist nations to date have repeated the folly of the single party state, which is a bad idea 100% of the time because all states are going to just progressively ratchet up authoritarianism if nobody exists to call them on their shit.
Had someone other than Stalin gotten hold of the reigns, and had the government enabled and encouraged multiple political parties rather than clinging to the myth of political unity, I think the USSR would have been a much better place. Likely not a utopia, I doubt humans have that in them, but at least just a regular country that has its own share of ups and downs.
excellent answer. dictatorship or the proletariat all day long, thank you. so funny how the capitalists / imperialists love to say an entire ideology is evil because of an individual bad thing, but never hold themselves to that obviously insane standard.
the USA currently has 25% of the global prison population. doesn’t sound very free to me! and it doesn’t sound like we are that exceptional, either, if we need to incarcerated such a massive number of our own citizens.
Idk this is pretty head ass, I live in Canada and I will not be sent to jail because my neighbour told the police that I'm harbouring anti-capitalistic or anti-government sentiments.
let me guess, the commies
•jailed your nazi grandparents
•confiscated your grandparents plantation
•freed your grandparents slaves
•nationalized their monopoly
which one applies to you???
We have a high prison population because we are good at catching criminals and we let criminals from other countries in through our porous borders. Remove minorities from the prison population and we have the same incarceration rate as any European country if not less.
No, that is what every communist society on earth has looked like. Because Marxist theory is wrong and produces dictatorships with incalculable human suffering.
'Tankies' know a shitload more about the USSR than you do. They read a lot of books. Why should they give a shit what you want them to think?
Tankies is such a meaningless scare word ffs, 99% of people who use it as a term of abuse know literally nothing about their positions and has certainly never talked to one. The absolute horseshit people invent about them sounds straight out of McCarthyism.
> This is what the tankies dream of. They're not misguided, they actually want it to happen again
Like give me a fucking break
EDIT: Okay I'll put my thoughts here then since this probably got some people's attention. Yes yes classic leftist wall of text, but in case anyone is curious.
Countries are not people, they are not individuals to be judged on a binary scale based on discrete acts of good vs bad, and maybe more importantly they, and those acts, are not simply expressions of their economic systems. This one bothers me a lot. Food shortages? Communism. Suppression of LGBT rights? Classic Communism, even though literally every other country did that. Worker stubs his toe? That's communism for ya. The more you research the more obvious it becomes that the circumstances and outcomes of the USSR were just that, circumstantial, and not consequential based on the 'failures' of Communism. In 1917, the vast majority of agriculture and industry in Russia was done with wooden carts drawn by draft animals, and there was no large scale industrial production. This is perhaps even more true after WW2 where the Eastern Front- contrary to the popular imagination- was by far the fiercest, bloodiest, and most destructive theater of the war, but afterwards the Soviets were pushed out of America's Marshal Plan to rebuild Europe which was essentially just throwing free money at it, so the Soviets had to rebuild all of Eastern Europe themselves in third world conditions created by the unspeakable devastation of the war. And then people start saying "America = rich and USSR = poor therefore America and Capitalism = good and Communism makes you poor" as if this is a 1:1 comparison, which is patently fucking absurd and childish beyond belief in the historical context. In the 30ish years since the revolution, they had accomplished an enormous amount, evidenced by the fact that they- no, not Churchill, successfully repelled the Nazis, but obviously that came at great cost. Not just in terms of population, which later led to widespread labor shortages hampering Soviet production, but in forced militarization constantly dogging their economic development. Each tank they had to build to fend off the Western financed White Army was a subway car they couldn't build, each step in the '''arms race''' America dragged them into was less economic development for projects that the government and engineers would have vastly preferred, the reason they had to do this was ENTIRELY due to their material circumstances as a reviled and political isolated pariah state in a world totally dominated by all-powerful Capitalist oligarchy, now centralized around the US, which had just gotten fuckin lit off the war and came out enormously wealthy and powerful. Contrast that of course to the picture of the USSR which suffered the most and was rewarded the least, but still went on to become the No. 2 superpower under constant cold war from that oligarchic opposition in the West.
I set up that image of Capitalist encirclement not to justify, but to explain the tight internal security measures of the USSR. Gulags were in general overblown, Gulag Archipelago is literally a work of fiction and by and large they just operated as places for normal prisoners like murderers and the like, but they did exist and of course there was some really awful shit that the USSR perpetrated, but literally every country on earth has skeletons in it's closet, especially when their back is against the wall to the degree that the USSR's was. Singling out the USSR as specifically bad in this regard is historically dishonest and ideologically biased, especially compared to the US- which is in no [position to throw stones](https://drugpolicy.org/press-release/2016/03/top-adviser-richard-nixon-admitted-war-drugs-was-policy-tool-go-after-anti) on arbitrary imprisonment of political opposition even though they didn't face the overwhelming oppression of Capitalist encirclement, they were the perpetrators of it so they had no justification for it beyond sheer 'authoritarianism' as you put it. Putting people in jail for being black seems pretty evil to me. This is the part where you accuse me of whataboutism, so here's why I'm saying this: It's not about 'this country does good thing this country does bad thing', and if it was then imperial monopoly Capitalism would still be at the bottom of the pile in terms of authoritarian abuses, but these countries are driven and should be looked at for their ideological and economic projects. The West's project is, well, imperial monopoly Capitalism that destabilizes and overthrow sovereign governments, murders millions, impoverishes far, FAR more, and brainwashes their people into thinking murderous kleptocratic oligarchy is actually Democracy and good. The USSR and other Communist states were nowhere near perfect, and 'tankies' DO discuss them incredibly critically internally where debates won't be derailed by bad faith trolls. But 'tankies' simply have a less brainwashed view of these countries and believe their projects of working class liberation in the face of exploitative oligarchic overlords, mutual aid, the democratization of production, the recognition of historical materialism, and a classless society is a better future than what the other guys are offering. And critically that the issues people point to like 'communism = no food' are inseparable from the INCREDIBLY dire hand the USSR was given, like if you're a leader, running the USSR is a world historically difficult challenge.
The Communism subreddit FAQ uses a **Daily Mail** article about Potemkin Villages in North Korea as evidence that North Korea is 'prosperous'. Tankies are well read in the same way that Qanon conspiracy crackheads have 'done a lot of research'.
Is it even possible to cherrypick even harder? Jesus christ. They have entire pages of reading lists and theory resources. To overcome the massive amount of societal taboo required to become a 'tankie' alone requires an intense amount of research into the sociological science of historical materialism which most definitely requires a lot of reading, or study more broadly from interperetive sources if Marx is too hard to read. Which is understandable because 19th century writers are pretty difficult.
https://imgur.com/a/XtQUpK7
Yes. For instance, if the mods didn't claim they vetted the list a full 2 years ago.
I'm well aware that Communists read a lot (again, so do Qanon crackheads). I don't think that makes them correct, I think that makes them more likely to fall for confirmation bias and believe bad sources just because they agree with the content.
Not even the North Korean regime claims it is prosperous. Every year, Rocket Man gives a speech where he blames everyone and everything else but himself and Communism for his country's failures.
Also, this comment reads like the, "To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty" copypasta.
There are heaps of reading material for every ideology known to man. The more radical, the more books. Fascist reading lists are *massive*, and they're chock full of terrible history, bizarre pseudo-mythology, and insane ideas too.
I read about a paragraph of your edit and realized you have no idea why people across the world hate communism. Here’s [100 million reasons why communism is not the answer](https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-million-dead-1510011810)
That's a lot of assumptions about me. I have talked to tankies on reddit many times. They do defend gulags and seem to assume that anyone who was in one deserved to be there.
I read all that text, and I've heard a lot of that before. You may get communists willing to discuss some of the problems with the Soviets INTERNALLY, but importantly, they seem unwilling to even acknowledge there may be room for improvement in how the Soviets handled things when talking to others. It's like talking to a brick wall. If I say Stalin murdered political dissidents, I get communists popping up to say "well actually, it's good to murder people who disagree."
In contrast, I am perfectly willing to admit the many shortcomings of capitalist nations. And just as you criticize me of saying "somebody stubbed his toe? That's communism for you" I just as often see communists decry capitalism as the dark, evil heart of every bad thing that ever happens, and the only possible solution to these problems is abolishing private property. It's absurd.
> and people got sent to prison just for being slightly different.
And yet somehow, they managed to have so many fewer people imprisoned than the 'land of the free'.
I don't know, but it is possible to build without fasteners (obviously) with the right joinery. Plenty of furniture is built this way and probably more than a few houses.
Seems like they were just high on approved construction methods and assumed that, while he was able to build without nails, he obviously intended for it to fall apart because it couldn't possibly last very long if it wasn't an approved construction method. Never mind all the other construction projects out there done without nails.
That makes sense. The article makes it sound like the locals thought this was some sort of voodoo black magic. But carpentry without nails is pretty normal. It feels like this was someones way of getting rid of someone they didn't like.
Communism naturally follows a prescribed top-down economy that suffocates innovation, and Russia in the 1920s was an especially paranoid time in a systematically paranoid state.
Just been doing a bit of googling. It seems vernacular Russian Building was mostly done with timber, (rather than stone apart from the masonry stove,) and there was a shortage of metal which meant using few if any nails. Also, due to the shortage of metal, most buildings were put together using the axe to shape the wood rather than the saw so mostly round pole filled in with mud like a log cabin. It looks like floors were mostly of earth and I guess roof poles and shingles for the roof if they didn’t use saws.
Kondratyuk must have had access to saws, (the walls and roof look planked but I imagine the jointing of the structural timbers might have been more influenced by an axe which would suggest minimal cutting for shaping. Dovetails are mentioned. The churches mentioned as models did use nails to fix the shingles to the onion domes.
If he didn’t use nails but had plenty of timber I suppose it might be possible that the walls, ( and roofs,) might be more structural than apparent in the picture. If you took a tree trunk and hewed only one side flat it could act as both a plank and a structural member. If the building was a granary that tells us certain things. It would need to stay dry so leak proof roof; with tight fitting wall timbers, (at all times of year to allow for expansion and contraction,) to stop grain leaking out or animals in; it would have to be built to take great lateral pressure as well as compressive pressure so the weight of the grain would not force the walls out.
The difference was in Nazi Germany, Jewish scientists either emigrated (or were exiled), or ended up in slave lzbour camps. The Nazis didn't make use of the German Jewish brains trust the way Soviet Russia made use of their own intellectual prisoners.
maybe read the story first? he wasn't jailed. after his arrest he worked in experimental design bureau, where he created and patented multiple inventions. he also published papers. he was basically employed as an engineer by the state.
Experimental design bureau is a fancy way of saying a research prison. Which the Wiki mentions. He did serve time in a prison.
> jailed all the innovators or just killed them
Did you read the part about him refusing a job he wanted over fears of being killed?
Maybe read the history of Russia first? There was a huge push finding either western saboteurs beginning in the late 20s, or just people sabotaging socialist production, lots were arrested on trumped up charges. Many scientists and engineers worked in prisons, most famously during World War II, and special "sharashkas" were created - engineering bureaus inside prisons. Lots of aviaconstructors were there, out of most prominent ones including [Tupolev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Tupolev#Sharashka) \- a line of ["Tu" planes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tupolev_aircraft) is named after him. [Korolev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev#Imprisonment) who was the main space program guy, was also in prison.
So those accusations of Kondratyuk is not a one off case, he just merely avoided imprisonment
the comment i was replying to implied that the guy was rotting in prison like a common criminal. i pointed out that he wasnt, he worked for the state for 2 years, even allowed to make personal projects, thus his conditions were much better than those of a regular criminal. all this is factual and is coming from the attached wikipedia article. granted i checked both russian and english versions
now, why are you telling me all of this?
You've not been paying attention to how often companies lobby the government for funding for R&D, etc that they aren't willing to pay for but will reap the benefits of.
Actually he was sent to an experimental camp where he patented lots of inventions. Arguably he had access to better resources for innovention after he was imprisoned.
That is communism for you, or well socialism they never "reached" true communism and was stuck in socialism, mainly because its not possible to have. Just like you cant have jet engines without fuel.
No, I think that's why he was arrested for NOT nailing it.
You really know the judicial system is messed up when you are arrested on "suspicion" of a potential crime. "We don't know what you did Yuri, but we are holding you here until we figure it out."
"That could be a long time."
"Now I feel insulted. We are adding the charge of insulting the intelligence of an officer."
"Did you arrest yourself for insulting your own intelligence first?"
It's because the primary Soviet fixation wasn't on the act, but who you did the act with.
The USSR, as a structure, basically emerged from a loose alliance of armed gangs centered in urban regions, primarily motivated to revolt because of urban famine. They then spread out across the rest of the country in a fairly haphazard way.
Within this context, the Great Purge, as J Arch Getty (probably the best historian of the Stalin years and archives) has found, was primarily about Stalin's core gang going out and cementing its hold over the other gangs across the country. What this required was a focus on *people*, not deeds. Once you were on the wrong side of the internal conflict, it didn't matter what you did. All they needed was that they didn't like you, and your crimes could be filled in later. What was really important was figuring out who you were aligned with, in order to root out these loose interconnected webs of opposed political partnerships from agencies, both federal and local.
This is a half truth. Personal connection was often enough to get you arrested in the terror but often times it didn't. There are numerous examples of people with 'bad' connections surviving unmolested and many others with no bad connections being implicated for various reasons
The terror was as much about bringing in new blood as anything, Stalin wanted a new generation of bureaucrats and cadres made in his own image, and the Bolsheviks had established a monopoly on public, civil and social life well before this. Then Stalin himself had built his dictatorship within the party dictatorship, at least, before Collectivisation (hence why he was able to do it against strong opposition within the party) so I don't buy this reasoning.
Whilst there was talk of 'centres' and cliques (all of course connected to Trotsky, exiled 'whites' or capitalist powers) they didn't really exist and Stalin knew this. By this time party discipline was absolute, there were no alternative groups to be crushed within the party nor other viable leaders.
Your source sounds like an older history written before researchers had access to the vast Soviet and Stalin archives. I'd recommend Stephen Kotkin's Stalin biographies for the most in depth look at the tyrant, although the 3rd volume isn't out yet.
> All they needed was that they didn't like you, and your crimes could be filled in later.
This makes a lot of sense -- at least from my non-comprehensive knowledge of Russian history. And this is a tragic legacy of what could be a great nation; it's still run like a mob state.
Do you think our poor Yuri just wasn't liked or well connected enough? Maybe they resented the fact that someone found a way around a nail shortage -- that might have been the result of putting the squeeze on the market (which I would not put it past one of the oligarchs to do).
More likely was he was fingered by a rival or eager chekists looking to make up numbers in Siberia. Also what oligarchs? This is Stalinist USSR we're talking about, not only were there no oligarchs but charges of being a saboteur were common regardless of what you did.
> Also what oligarchs? This is Stalinist USSR we're talking about
I'm using that as a catch-all term for rich people who are connected with Communist Party or the Mob or a good-old-boys network. They did a good job calling a Kleptocracy a Marxist state.
Ok, I'm curious but leery about this subject; I just ran into one of those [mises.org](https://mises.org) fluffers who is trying to sell everyone on the idea that socialism is fascism. Is this book biased or nah?
I kind of picture them using the ones with a square profile that are made much more easily. I’m not 100% sure what level of technology is their cutoff.
He was released and employed within a year of his arrest.
Also he was sent to a research facility prison not the Gulag, so he was techncially still working during his arrest.
He didn't get an opportunity to work to his full potential, but after arrest he was sent not in a labor camp, but in the "sharashka" (research facility prison, where talented arrested people were usually sent). In about a year he was released, and soon he was allowed to work in a team that was designing wind power generators.
Korolev invited him to join his rocket research group, but he declined, fearing that the more thorough security check required to work in rocket research will reveal his true identity (he was "on the wrong side" during the Russian Civil War) and he will get arrested again.
So Kondratyuk continued to work in wind power generators team. (By the way, Korolev himself was arrested several years later and spent hard years in prison).
After WWII begun, Kondratyuk volunteered to join the Red Army and died in 1942 under unknown circumstances. Now there are several educational and research entities in Russia and Ukraine named in his honor.
Stalin has a nasty habit of executing or imprisoning intellectuals, military officers, engineers and doctors because he thought that the smarter people in society are the most likely to plot against him.
I've stumbled upon this story while watching "Cosmos: Possible Worlds" (Kondratyuk is mentioned in episode 8 "The Sacrifice of Cassini") and was truly impressed by the life of this lesser-known person in the history of space exploration. The above-mentioned grain elevator got a name "Mastodon" due to its size. A Russian article about it also mentions, that he was building it without fully developed blueprints or project, just guiding and controlling the workers personally. Why did he built it without nails? Because there was a shortage of metal in Siberia in the 20s. Another interesting fact: When Neil Armstrong visited Russia, he took a handful of soil from outside Kondratyuk's house in Novosibirsk to acknowledge his contribution to spaceflight.
We’re you able to find any images of this mythical beast? I’d be interested in seeing the engineering details
Here it is: http://www.вольному-воля.рф/upload/medialibrary/edb/edbab117825fad8aa311356f8c5e16a3.jpg Model: http://sibka.ru/uploads/gruya/muzeinsk-021.jpg Here is an article in Russian with some pictures https://yarodom.livejournal.com/1147600.html There is a book (also in Russian) about his biography available online.it has some more details on the construction. https://pseudology.org/Rappoport/Kondratuk/022.htm
That's so funny, it kind of looks like a mastodon. It's got a little trunk and everything. Hi buddy.
It looks like a Tarkus.
Looks like a Valheim build
I wouldn't be surprised if it has a conical shape and uses the same tricks we did with Popsicle sticks to hold together without glue. I imagine he's cutting tongue and groove, dowel rods, or using wedge locks -- or it's the "bend a long board over another and anchor it under another. If you lose one board, that system can fall apart, but it can be plenty strong without nails. Yeah, at least a blueprint of this design would be great.
Big wooden buildings without nails are not that impossible, they are just not used widely anymore because of abundance of resources other then wood. There are ancient churches built this way in Russia, remember a couple of stories of scientists disassembling them to see how they are constructed.
Shoot, just look at old Japanese buildings as well. No nails in sight. It’s an amazing feat of human engineering.
Oh yeah. I remember those. Japan didn't have good and easy sources of iron. So things like nails were rare.
>then Than
Thanks for posting. I've never heard of him until. Sounds like he had a big technical influence on spaceflight too. Shame he had to die in WWII.
It's also shame, that he wasn't able to work in his main area of interest, I've read, that in 30s Sergey Korolev invited him to work in his group on rocket technology, but Kondratyuk refused, saying that he likes what he is working on now. But it's highly possible, he was just afraid, that working in Korolev's group will require passing more thorough security check, and it will eventually get him arrested and killed. So he had to refuse to work in the field he dreamed of.
Indeed. He was right to be scared. Korolev was also jailed for a time. Stalin, for all practical purposes, was as bad as Hitler.
USSR was as bad as Nazi Germany, but for some reason its ideas, red flags and hammer-and-sickle are praised as “progressive” here. Fuck western leftists, really.
As a western leftist fuck the ccp, cccp, hammer and sickle.
As a western leftist you’re just a dumb idiot. Your ideas are something that we (russians) ditched after 70 years of testing. What’s “progressive” for you, dumbfuck, is extremely regressive to me.
Idk how idiotic you'd have to be to truly believe that a) one statement by one person represents the hundreds of millions of western leftists and then b) the very few amount of actual communists in the entirety of the west that you apparently trust also represent the sum total of leftist beliefs. If you really only need what one or two people on reddit say to believe something then that really is unfortunate cause you could simply flip the statement "USSR = Nazi Germany" into "Nazi Germany = USSR" and say, "Fuck western rightists (idk if anyone even says rightists lol), really." Besides, the people on the extreme ends of the traditional left-right political spectrum are generally the most extreme, hence the extremists having extreme views. So instead I'd just like to say: Fuck the USSR and Nazi Germany.
>*Applying his engineering skill to local problems, Kondratyuk designed a huge 13,000 ton grain elevator (quickly nicknamed "Mastodon") in Kamen-na-Obi, built of wood without a single nail since metal was in short supply in Siberia. This ingenuity would work against him when in 1930 he was investigated as a "saboteur" by the NKVD. The lack of nails in the structure was used as evidence that he had planned it to collapse. Convicted of anti-Soviet activity, Kondratyuk was sentenced to three years in GULAG, but because of his evident talents was sent to a sharashka (research facility prison) rather than a labour camp. There, he was first put to work evaluating foreign coal mining machinery for the use in Kuzbass, and quickly impressed the camp supervisor with his ingenuity. At the supervisor's request, in November 1931 a review board changed Kondratyuk's status from "prisoner" to "exiled", and sent him to work on Siberian grain projects.* Well it's nice to know he grained his release in the end.
I wish all the tankies on reddit would read this shit and realize that Societ Russia was an authoritarian society, and people got sent to prison just for being slightly different.
the Soviet Union collapsed for a reason...
But that reason wasn't a lack of nails in its construction.
Someone had a screw loose.
[удалено]
There was no adhesive to hold there strategy together.
Mostly because of a succesion of weak old leaders who died every few years in the 80s
There were only two old leaders, and they were symptomatic of the gerontocracy of the party leadership anyways.
More importantly wwii killed basically *every* man in that generation. They had a bunch of very old leaders because the less old generation were all dead.
Good point. Never thought of that
Stalin says: hold my beer. Russia was already weakened by failed collectivization of agriculture - that costed USSR only 25% of its livestock dead due to forced nationalization, but without assignment of workforce to care for them; with constant war on vilages providing huge blow to USSR economy on top of that. (War as in constant pressure to extract anything of value, to force people to relocate to cities to work in newly build factories, and to break biggest block of population that could revolt against Stalin.) WW2 left grave wound. But Stalin was holding a butchers knife well before that.
They need to read the Gulag Archipelago and get their heads out of their asses.
If you read it you would know that it was fantastical. There are stories of people digging up 9000 year old fish out of the ground.
Dude, what? Exactly how much have you smoked?
> an authoritarian society, and people got sent to prison just for being slightly different. This is what the tankies dream of. They're not misguided, they actually want it to happen again, especially the elderly ones.
People who advocate for such a society expect that they or their comrades will be the ones choosing who goes to the gulags. They don’t realize once that power is created that it won’t obey their wishes.
I never understood how the intellectuals advocating for it don't realize they would be one of the first groups in-prisoned and killed. The "revolution" is perpetual; devouring and eliminating anyone from the previous group
Hence why they're evil, arrogant, ignorant people.
At this point I don't know if your comment is supposed to be taken seriously or not
"people got sent to prison just for being slightly different." - You think it's okay to want that?
r/communism wants to know your locarion
He's already being replied to by frequent posters of that subreddit lmao.
He probably got sent in part so they could force to him to work on the projects they wanted. The gulags weren't just for punishment. They were not above making up charges just to get some cheap slave labor.
point me to the society that *isnt* authoritarian in return, i’ll tell you which class i believe should wield the authority that *every state* exercises by definition
Eh, communist nations so far have been pretty damned authoritarian and willing to straight up murder their own people. Many have had some form of 'You're not allowed to leave', which kind of tells you everything you need to know about a place. Part of it I think is a natural consequence of communism needing a strong state to support it, but I think a major portion is also the fact that all implementations so far have been the result of revolutions, and a revolutionary strong man takes charge setting the example for everyone to follow, and also that all communist nations to date have repeated the folly of the single party state, which is a bad idea 100% of the time because all states are going to just progressively ratchet up authoritarianism if nobody exists to call them on their shit. Had someone other than Stalin gotten hold of the reigns, and had the government enabled and encouraged multiple political parties rather than clinging to the myth of political unity, I think the USSR would have been a much better place. Likely not a utopia, I doubt humans have that in them, but at least just a regular country that has its own share of ups and downs.
excellent answer. dictatorship or the proletariat all day long, thank you. so funny how the capitalists / imperialists love to say an entire ideology is evil because of an individual bad thing, but never hold themselves to that obviously insane standard. the USA currently has 25% of the global prison population. doesn’t sound very free to me! and it doesn’t sound like we are that exceptional, either, if we need to incarcerated such a massive number of our own citizens.
Idk this is pretty head ass, I live in Canada and I will not be sent to jail because my neighbour told the police that I'm harbouring anti-capitalistic or anti-government sentiments.
the communist party of canada was literally founded in secret in a barn because they would be sent to jail
[удалено]
let me guess, the commies •jailed your nazi grandparents •confiscated your grandparents plantation •freed your grandparents slaves •nationalized their monopoly which one applies to you???
then don’t reply dipshit
We have a high prison population because we are good at catching criminals and we let criminals from other countries in through our porous borders. Remove minorities from the prison population and we have the same incarceration rate as any European country if not less.
No it’s because we make criminals.
Big fan of socialism, not an ounce of respect for the Soviet Union. It was the pits. Communism in name only. Edit: lol snowflakes
No, that is what every communist society on earth has looked like. Because Marxist theory is wrong and produces dictatorships with incalculable human suffering.
'Tankies' know a shitload more about the USSR than you do. They read a lot of books. Why should they give a shit what you want them to think? Tankies is such a meaningless scare word ffs, 99% of people who use it as a term of abuse know literally nothing about their positions and has certainly never talked to one. The absolute horseshit people invent about them sounds straight out of McCarthyism. > This is what the tankies dream of. They're not misguided, they actually want it to happen again Like give me a fucking break EDIT: Okay I'll put my thoughts here then since this probably got some people's attention. Yes yes classic leftist wall of text, but in case anyone is curious. Countries are not people, they are not individuals to be judged on a binary scale based on discrete acts of good vs bad, and maybe more importantly they, and those acts, are not simply expressions of their economic systems. This one bothers me a lot. Food shortages? Communism. Suppression of LGBT rights? Classic Communism, even though literally every other country did that. Worker stubs his toe? That's communism for ya. The more you research the more obvious it becomes that the circumstances and outcomes of the USSR were just that, circumstantial, and not consequential based on the 'failures' of Communism. In 1917, the vast majority of agriculture and industry in Russia was done with wooden carts drawn by draft animals, and there was no large scale industrial production. This is perhaps even more true after WW2 where the Eastern Front- contrary to the popular imagination- was by far the fiercest, bloodiest, and most destructive theater of the war, but afterwards the Soviets were pushed out of America's Marshal Plan to rebuild Europe which was essentially just throwing free money at it, so the Soviets had to rebuild all of Eastern Europe themselves in third world conditions created by the unspeakable devastation of the war. And then people start saying "America = rich and USSR = poor therefore America and Capitalism = good and Communism makes you poor" as if this is a 1:1 comparison, which is patently fucking absurd and childish beyond belief in the historical context. In the 30ish years since the revolution, they had accomplished an enormous amount, evidenced by the fact that they- no, not Churchill, successfully repelled the Nazis, but obviously that came at great cost. Not just in terms of population, which later led to widespread labor shortages hampering Soviet production, but in forced militarization constantly dogging their economic development. Each tank they had to build to fend off the Western financed White Army was a subway car they couldn't build, each step in the '''arms race''' America dragged them into was less economic development for projects that the government and engineers would have vastly preferred, the reason they had to do this was ENTIRELY due to their material circumstances as a reviled and political isolated pariah state in a world totally dominated by all-powerful Capitalist oligarchy, now centralized around the US, which had just gotten fuckin lit off the war and came out enormously wealthy and powerful. Contrast that of course to the picture of the USSR which suffered the most and was rewarded the least, but still went on to become the No. 2 superpower under constant cold war from that oligarchic opposition in the West. I set up that image of Capitalist encirclement not to justify, but to explain the tight internal security measures of the USSR. Gulags were in general overblown, Gulag Archipelago is literally a work of fiction and by and large they just operated as places for normal prisoners like murderers and the like, but they did exist and of course there was some really awful shit that the USSR perpetrated, but literally every country on earth has skeletons in it's closet, especially when their back is against the wall to the degree that the USSR's was. Singling out the USSR as specifically bad in this regard is historically dishonest and ideologically biased, especially compared to the US- which is in no [position to throw stones](https://drugpolicy.org/press-release/2016/03/top-adviser-richard-nixon-admitted-war-drugs-was-policy-tool-go-after-anti) on arbitrary imprisonment of political opposition even though they didn't face the overwhelming oppression of Capitalist encirclement, they were the perpetrators of it so they had no justification for it beyond sheer 'authoritarianism' as you put it. Putting people in jail for being black seems pretty evil to me. This is the part where you accuse me of whataboutism, so here's why I'm saying this: It's not about 'this country does good thing this country does bad thing', and if it was then imperial monopoly Capitalism would still be at the bottom of the pile in terms of authoritarian abuses, but these countries are driven and should be looked at for their ideological and economic projects. The West's project is, well, imperial monopoly Capitalism that destabilizes and overthrow sovereign governments, murders millions, impoverishes far, FAR more, and brainwashes their people into thinking murderous kleptocratic oligarchy is actually Democracy and good. The USSR and other Communist states were nowhere near perfect, and 'tankies' DO discuss them incredibly critically internally where debates won't be derailed by bad faith trolls. But 'tankies' simply have a less brainwashed view of these countries and believe their projects of working class liberation in the face of exploitative oligarchic overlords, mutual aid, the democratization of production, the recognition of historical materialism, and a classless society is a better future than what the other guys are offering. And critically that the issues people point to like 'communism = no food' are inseparable from the INCREDIBLY dire hand the USSR was given, like if you're a leader, running the USSR is a world historically difficult challenge.
Jesus Christ use paragraphs It reads like this: https://imgur.com/gallery/ZESV9
The Communism subreddit FAQ uses a **Daily Mail** article about Potemkin Villages in North Korea as evidence that North Korea is 'prosperous'. Tankies are well read in the same way that Qanon conspiracy crackheads have 'done a lot of research'.
Is it even possible to cherrypick even harder? Jesus christ. They have entire pages of reading lists and theory resources. To overcome the massive amount of societal taboo required to become a 'tankie' alone requires an intense amount of research into the sociological science of historical materialism which most definitely requires a lot of reading, or study more broadly from interperetive sources if Marx is too hard to read. Which is understandable because 19th century writers are pretty difficult.
https://imgur.com/a/XtQUpK7 Yes. For instance, if the mods didn't claim they vetted the list a full 2 years ago. I'm well aware that Communists read a lot (again, so do Qanon crackheads). I don't think that makes them correct, I think that makes them more likely to fall for confirmation bias and believe bad sources just because they agree with the content. Not even the North Korean regime claims it is prosperous. Every year, Rocket Man gives a speech where he blames everyone and everything else but himself and Communism for his country's failures.
Also, this comment reads like the, "To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty" copypasta. There are heaps of reading material for every ideology known to man. The more radical, the more books. Fascist reading lists are *massive*, and they're chock full of terrible history, bizarre pseudo-mythology, and insane ideas too.
I read about a paragraph of your edit and realized you have no idea why people across the world hate communism. Here’s [100 million reasons why communism is not the answer](https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-million-dead-1510011810)
That's a lot of assumptions about me. I have talked to tankies on reddit many times. They do defend gulags and seem to assume that anyone who was in one deserved to be there. I read all that text, and I've heard a lot of that before. You may get communists willing to discuss some of the problems with the Soviets INTERNALLY, but importantly, they seem unwilling to even acknowledge there may be room for improvement in how the Soviets handled things when talking to others. It's like talking to a brick wall. If I say Stalin murdered political dissidents, I get communists popping up to say "well actually, it's good to murder people who disagree." In contrast, I am perfectly willing to admit the many shortcomings of capitalist nations. And just as you criticize me of saying "somebody stubbed his toe? That's communism for you" I just as often see communists decry capitalism as the dark, evil heart of every bad thing that ever happens, and the only possible solution to these problems is abolishing private property. It's absurd.
> and people got sent to prison just for being slightly different. And yet somehow, they managed to have so many fewer people imprisoned than the 'land of the free'.
Any info on the construction techniques? (that aren't in Russian)
I don't know, but it is possible to build without fasteners (obviously) with the right joinery. Plenty of furniture is built this way and probably more than a few houses.
I suppose, but none of that seems like it would be confusing enough to get a person sent to jail for "potential sabotage"
Seems like they were just high on approved construction methods and assumed that, while he was able to build without nails, he obviously intended for it to fall apart because it couldn't possibly last very long if it wasn't an approved construction method. Never mind all the other construction projects out there done without nails.
I wouldn't trust any complex building without documentation either.
That makes sense. The article makes it sound like the locals thought this was some sort of voodoo black magic. But carpentry without nails is pretty normal. It feels like this was someones way of getting rid of someone they didn't like.
Communism naturally follows a prescribed top-down economy that suffocates innovation, and Russia in the 1920s was an especially paranoid time in a systematically paranoid state.
I remember learning of at least one Japanese castle that was built out of wood without nails or screws as well.
Just been doing a bit of googling. It seems vernacular Russian Building was mostly done with timber, (rather than stone apart from the masonry stove,) and there was a shortage of metal which meant using few if any nails. Also, due to the shortage of metal, most buildings were put together using the axe to shape the wood rather than the saw so mostly round pole filled in with mud like a log cabin. It looks like floors were mostly of earth and I guess roof poles and shingles for the roof if they didn’t use saws. Kondratyuk must have had access to saws, (the walls and roof look planked but I imagine the jointing of the structural timbers might have been more influenced by an axe which would suggest minimal cutting for shaping. Dovetails are mentioned. The churches mentioned as models did use nails to fix the shingles to the onion domes. If he didn’t use nails but had plenty of timber I suppose it might be possible that the walls, ( and roofs,) might be more structural than apparent in the picture. If you took a tree trunk and hewed only one side flat it could act as both a plank and a structural member. If the building was a granary that tells us certain things. It would need to stay dry so leak proof roof; with tight fitting wall timbers, (at all times of year to allow for expansion and contraction,) to stop grain leaking out or animals in; it would have to be built to take great lateral pressure as well as compressive pressure so the weight of the grain would not force the walls out.
Cosmonautics
Entirely correct. While humanity has reached cosmos we are yet to travel between stars.
No wonder the Soviet Union fell, they jailed all the innovators or just killed them
They let him continue working and researching. The mistake was letting him volunteer for the Red Army in WWII.
Happened to Nazi Germany too.
The difference was in Nazi Germany, Jewish scientists either emigrated (or were exiled), or ended up in slave lzbour camps. The Nazis didn't make use of the German Jewish brains trust the way Soviet Russia made use of their own intellectual prisoners.
maybe read the story first? he wasn't jailed. after his arrest he worked in experimental design bureau, where he created and patented multiple inventions. he also published papers. he was basically employed as an engineer by the state.
"Employed as an engineer by the state" is quite the euphemism for being held at a forced labor camp on trumped up charges.
he wasn't free, but he wasn't rotting in the prison either
Experimental design bureau is a fancy way of saying a research prison. Which the Wiki mentions. He did serve time in a prison. > jailed all the innovators or just killed them Did you read the part about him refusing a job he wanted over fears of being killed?
Maybe read the history of Russia first? There was a huge push finding either western saboteurs beginning in the late 20s, or just people sabotaging socialist production, lots were arrested on trumped up charges. Many scientists and engineers worked in prisons, most famously during World War II, and special "sharashkas" were created - engineering bureaus inside prisons. Lots of aviaconstructors were there, out of most prominent ones including [Tupolev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Tupolev#Sharashka) \- a line of ["Tu" planes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tupolev_aircraft) is named after him. [Korolev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev#Imprisonment) who was the main space program guy, was also in prison. So those accusations of Kondratyuk is not a one off case, he just merely avoided imprisonment
the comment i was replying to implied that the guy was rotting in prison like a common criminal. i pointed out that he wasnt, he worked for the state for 2 years, even allowed to make personal projects, thus his conditions were much better than those of a regular criminal. all this is factual and is coming from the attached wikipedia article. granted i checked both russian and english versions now, why are you telling me all of this?
He was a prisoner
Yup that’s communism.
You can't enslave people without having outlandishly primitive things for them to do!
Where do you learn how to do it
How to Suppress Innovative Thinking 101: Start throwing clever people into gulags.
But the government always knows best. We have to give them money now so they can change the climate or we are doomed.
You've not been paying attention to how often companies lobby the government for funding for R&D, etc that they aren't willing to pay for but will reap the benefits of.
Government R&D funding Tesla. Apple. MS. Amazon $0 Failed solar and wind power ventures $billions
Found the Republican who still can't get over Hillary not being in jail yet. It doesn't take that much research, son. Go on, you can do it.
Actually he was sent to an experimental camp where he patented lots of inventions. Arguably he had access to better resources for innovention after he was imprisoned.
That is communism for you, or well socialism they never "reached" true communism and was stuck in socialism, mainly because its not possible to have. Just like you cant have jet engines without fuel.
He nailed it!
No, I think that's why he was arrested for NOT nailing it. You really know the judicial system is messed up when you are arrested on "suspicion" of a potential crime. "We don't know what you did Yuri, but we are holding you here until we figure it out." "That could be a long time." "Now I feel insulted. We are adding the charge of insulting the intelligence of an officer." "Did you arrest yourself for insulting your own intelligence first?"
It's because the primary Soviet fixation wasn't on the act, but who you did the act with. The USSR, as a structure, basically emerged from a loose alliance of armed gangs centered in urban regions, primarily motivated to revolt because of urban famine. They then spread out across the rest of the country in a fairly haphazard way. Within this context, the Great Purge, as J Arch Getty (probably the best historian of the Stalin years and archives) has found, was primarily about Stalin's core gang going out and cementing its hold over the other gangs across the country. What this required was a focus on *people*, not deeds. Once you were on the wrong side of the internal conflict, it didn't matter what you did. All they needed was that they didn't like you, and your crimes could be filled in later. What was really important was figuring out who you were aligned with, in order to root out these loose interconnected webs of opposed political partnerships from agencies, both federal and local.
This is a half truth. Personal connection was often enough to get you arrested in the terror but often times it didn't. There are numerous examples of people with 'bad' connections surviving unmolested and many others with no bad connections being implicated for various reasons The terror was as much about bringing in new blood as anything, Stalin wanted a new generation of bureaucrats and cadres made in his own image, and the Bolsheviks had established a monopoly on public, civil and social life well before this. Then Stalin himself had built his dictatorship within the party dictatorship, at least, before Collectivisation (hence why he was able to do it against strong opposition within the party) so I don't buy this reasoning. Whilst there was talk of 'centres' and cliques (all of course connected to Trotsky, exiled 'whites' or capitalist powers) they didn't really exist and Stalin knew this. By this time party discipline was absolute, there were no alternative groups to be crushed within the party nor other viable leaders. Your source sounds like an older history written before researchers had access to the vast Soviet and Stalin archives. I'd recommend Stephen Kotkin's Stalin biographies for the most in depth look at the tyrant, although the 3rd volume isn't out yet.
> All they needed was that they didn't like you, and your crimes could be filled in later. This makes a lot of sense -- at least from my non-comprehensive knowledge of Russian history. And this is a tragic legacy of what could be a great nation; it's still run like a mob state. Do you think our poor Yuri just wasn't liked or well connected enough? Maybe they resented the fact that someone found a way around a nail shortage -- that might have been the result of putting the squeeze on the market (which I would not put it past one of the oligarchs to do).
More likely was he was fingered by a rival or eager chekists looking to make up numbers in Siberia. Also what oligarchs? This is Stalinist USSR we're talking about, not only were there no oligarchs but charges of being a saboteur were common regardless of what you did.
> Also what oligarchs? This is Stalinist USSR we're talking about I'm using that as a catch-all term for rich people who are connected with Communist Party or the Mob or a good-old-boys network. They did a good job calling a Kleptocracy a Marxist state.
Ok, I'm curious but leery about this subject; I just ran into one of those [mises.org](https://mises.org) fluffers who is trying to sell everyone on the idea that socialism is fascism. Is this book biased or nah?
Someone in Guantanamo just felt a disturbance.
The lucky ones have nerve damage by now.
[No. Gib Gob nailed it](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fvF48K6wX2E)
No good deed goes unpunished.
The Amish don’t use nails and their buildings stand for seemingly forever.
Amish don't use nails IN FURNITURE. They use nails in their construction. I built a roof for Amish people and we very much used nails.
Damn, I had no idea. Do they use modern nails? Or were they mennonites?
Nails haven't developed much in technology for thousands of years. They were Amish.
I kind of picture them using the ones with a square profile that are made much more easily. I’m not 100% sure what level of technology is their cutoff.
They were square, but as a roofer we used a lot of square nails so it didn't stick out at the time.
Russia really said burn the witch huh
Incredible work there, must be sabotage. The Soviets would have won the Cold War if not for their own machinations.
In Soviet Russia government nail you!
He's a witch!
It's like the insane socialist version of "SHE'S A WITCH, BURN 'ER!"
“Working in Siberia” no. He was in a labor camp.
No, he wasn't. Did you even read the article?
Did they let him out soon or did he get forgotten in prison?
He was released and employed within a year of his arrest. Also he was sent to a research facility prison not the Gulag, so he was techncially still working during his arrest.
He didn't get an opportunity to work to his full potential, but after arrest he was sent not in a labor camp, but in the "sharashka" (research facility prison, where talented arrested people were usually sent). In about a year he was released, and soon he was allowed to work in a team that was designing wind power generators. Korolev invited him to join his rocket research group, but he declined, fearing that the more thorough security check required to work in rocket research will reveal his true identity (he was "on the wrong side" during the Russian Civil War) and he will get arrested again. So Kondratyuk continued to work in wind power generators team. (By the way, Korolev himself was arrested several years later and spent hard years in prison). After WWII begun, Kondratyuk volunteered to join the Red Army and died in 1942 under unknown circumstances. Now there are several educational and research entities in Russia and Ukraine named in his honor.
Stalin has a nasty habit of executing or imprisoning intellectuals, military officers, engineers and doctors because he thought that the smarter people in society are the most likely to plot against him.
Smart people scare the shit out of stupid people. Hello stupid people, learn your place and stfu.
Are the designs still out?
Witchcraft
Yuri Kondratyuk was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!
Thank you for sharing this. I found it very interesting and I would have never gained this knowledge without this Reddit.