Why did Soviet electronics "lag behind the West"?

A lot of potentially valuable people didn't make it out of the Great Patriotic War alive. The Soviets lost an entire generation of engineers.

Of course that leads to the question of how smart it is to use potential scientists and engineers as grunts. This isn't even restricted to Soviet countries.
 
Of course that leads to the question of how smart it is to use potential scientists and engineers as grunts. This isn't even restricted to Soviet countries.

Unless you're talking about removing humans from battlefields entirely, then that issue will always be with us. Britain and France lost a generation each in the trenches of WW1, along with who knows how many scientists, engineers, artists, and others. In the case of the USSR and WW2, though, it is arguably more reasonable: when Guderian and von Manstein are driving tank armies across your agricultural and industrial heartlands, a certain sense of urgency about the situation might not be a bad idea! It's impossible to predict which scrawny conscript might turn out to be a concert pianist, and it doesn't matter - if you don't stop the panzers, the only music played will be Wagner, forevermore. So while the waste of human potential then was huge, and appallingly tragic, I can't actually blame the USSR for dealing with the existential crisis they were facing. And let's be honest - if there were invading armies blitzkrieging across our own countries, how many of us would fight even if we were told "Nyet, you are a promising young writer! Too valuable to risk!"? The temptation would be very strong to ignore officialdom and find a way to be involved anyway.
 
Unless you're talking about removing humans from battlefields entirely, then that issue will always be with us. Britain and France lost a generation each in the trenches of WW1, along with who knows how many scientists, engineers, artists, and others. In the case of the USSR and WW2, though, it is arguably more reasonable: when Guderian and von Manstein are driving tank armies across your agricultural and industrial heartlands, a certain sense of urgency about the situation might not be a bad idea! It's impossible to predict which scrawny conscript might turn out to be a concert pianist, and it doesn't matter - if you don't stop the panzers, the only music played will be Wagner, forevermore. So while the waste of human potential then was huge, and appallingly tragic, I can't actually blame the USSR for dealing with the existential crisis they were facing. And let's be honest - if there were invading armies blitzkrieging across our own countries, how many of us would fight even if we were told "Nyet, you are a promising young writer! Too valuable to risk!"? The temptation would be very strong to ignore officialdom and find a way to be involved anyway.
Well, artists are one thing--Leningrad symphonies aside, art per se doesn't directly contribute to victory in a war, especially a war like the Soviet war--but a lot of other specialists are something else. You gotta have the people who are making the weapons you're using to kill the other guys, after all. And no one's talking about not drafting people who might turn out to be skilled engineers and scientists, but maybe not vacuuming up people who already are, and half the time working on defense projects. You laugh, but even in the United States Vannevar Bush had a hell of time keeping his people out of the draft, and these were people who were actively working on things like the proximity fuse! In the Soviet Union, things were probably ten times worse. As you say, to some extent this is understandable, but...
 
I recall a documentary where it was claimed taht the Soviet leadership deliberately held back things like computer technology because they were afraid of it, as it took power out of their hands
 
No, I don't think so. At the start of the CW the US was circa 10 years ahead in computer technology. This gap only grew due to a variety of factors. The reasons listed below are also true for other NATO countries.

1) Much bigger pool of qualified technicians and scientists.

2) More money and an economic system that allowed efficient investments, efficient RnD and close cooperation between military and civilian industries.

3) Research and development wasn't subjected to political trends. Let's take the GDR for example. Contrary to popular oppinion the Politbureau was aware of future technology and its potential. Ulbricht heavily invested into chip development. This investment was really costly and prevented raising the availability of consumer goods. One of the essential reasons that allowed Honecker to overthrow Ulbricht, was the fact that the people wanted cars and butter. Other politbureau members were aware of that and in the end most power brokers decided that social peace (more cars etc.) was more important than funding an inefficient industry that yieldes little immediate gain. It was simply "easier" to acquire western designs.

4) Military overspending "sucked the air" out of other sectors. So much money was flowing into the military, that a lot of talented people basically were forced to work in the arms industry or directly join the military. A job as a weapons designer was more secure and had better career prospects than becoming a computer chip designer. Military stuff always was THE priority in all Eastern Bloc countries.




Because both countries were vastly more educated and developed from the start. Tsarist Russia was underdeveloped, Civil War and Holdomor made things worse. Stalin's "rapid industrialization" wasn't able or designed to turn the Soviet Union in what would today be called a first world nation. And after WW2 the Soviets were the most devastated and recieved no outside help to kickstart their economy again.
The Soviet Union and the rest of the countries that would be the Warsaw Pact offered Aid through the Marshall Plan and refused it so you can't blame the West for not trying
 
Marshall Plan came with strings attached that included certain property protections and the like that basically disqualified communist countries if they didn't retool their economies to be more capitalist.
 

trurle

Banned
As an expert in the field, i must give a detailed answer. In brief, problem with Soviet microchips was systemic (multiple reasons)
1) Severe brain drain - in particular, the backbone of Israeli Tower fab personnel (flourishing till today) was formed by Soviet emigrants.
1a) Bad designs - for example, Soviet engineers never managed to make a reliable keyboards, hampering productivity in EDA software
1b) Bad work culture - for example, the Tbilisi fab was known to produce exclusively garbage in summer months, because air quality control was impossible to enforce.
1c) Low motivation of remained electronic workers resulting in bad productivity
2) Centralized decision system stifling progress
2a) Decision to reverse-engineer foreign chips en masse, which diverted the limited manpower from semiconductor process development
2b) Failure to identify CMOS as most promising technology. Soviet Union invested heavily into deadlock IIL (integrated injection logic) 8-bit chipset development in the late 197x.
2c) Stifling of independent enterprises
2d) Over-conservatism in education - the difficult approval for university technical programs has resulted in growing gap between state-of-art and contents of textbooks
3) Lack of self-accelerating effects of electronic design automation software
3a) Reliance on "hacked" foreign software which is more difficult to extend
3b) Problems with software distribution due low-quality Soviet magnetic powders limiting program portability (which affected both tapes and FDDs).

I must also note what verbal attack on American developments in cybernetics in early 195x was largely unrelated to the decline of Soviet electronic industry which happened much later.
 
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The Soviet electronic equipment was better suited to survive a electromagnetic pulse generated by a nuclear explosion meaning their planes, radar etc would continue to work after an a-bomb was dropped.
 
This is why I don't get people who advocate the "fully automated (luxury gay space) communism" meme.

As everyone else has made some fantastic points, I'd just address this minor part. FALGSC isn't associated with the Soviet Union, it doesn't mean the Soviets itself and doesn't imply anything for them. It's simply a meme about fully-automating our lives, making luxuries a common item, sexual liberation, space exploration/colonization, and a post-scarcity world around the concept of communism. At most, the memes use Soviet propaganda aesthetics and nothing more, not literally a Soviet-era thing.
 
I think the matter is not so much what held them back, but more simply the absence of anyone pushing for it in a centrally planned command economy.
Electronics in the West wasn't a development that came from gouvernments deciding to do it. It came from private industry figuring there's money to be made from electronics, then some competing company coming up with something better, a 3rd one coming up with a way of making the 2nd ones idea cheaper and so on.
Blaming the 2nd World War ignores a place called Japan, also suffering massive casualties and devastation during it.
 

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I think the matter is not so much what held them back, but more simply the absence of anyone pushing for it in a centrally planned command economy.
Electronics in the West wasn't a development that came from gouvernments deciding to do it. It came from private industry figuring there's money to be made from electronics, then some competing company coming up with something better, a 3rd one coming up with a way of making the 2nd ones idea cheaper and so on.
Blaming the 2nd World War ignores a place called Japan, also suffering massive casualties and devastation during it.
History though shows differently. The transistor came out of government projects for radar development and was primarily used for military computing, radios, and various other electronic usage (proximity fuzes for example), only becoming commercialized viably after various government projects made it economical (same with TVs and a variety of cheap consumer electronics post-WW2). The entire Japanese electronics industry was a massive government project to build it up after WW2 so that they'd have something to export. There is no reason a centrally planned economy couldn't do it provided they didn't stifle the sharing of information among the general populace and jealously hide scientific developments to try and keep a competitive edge. Nazi Germany is an example of a state that had a pretty cutting edge electronics industry in the 1930s, but lost that edge very handily by the increasing police state cutting off sharing of information and private ownership of certain types of personal electronics (ham radios), conscripting engineers and scientists in to the military, poorly shifted resources around to various projects which deprived the electronics industry until far too late, and pushed dead end developments due to poor scientific understanding amongst bureaucrats in charge of funding. The US on the other hand during WW2 actually pushed electronics developments to new heights due to the war and centrally planning and funding research, plus then distributing the information gained from their efforts broadly. See the MIT radlab during the war and the huge series of books they put together for teaching material for newcomers in the field after funding was cut for their research.

With the Soviets in particular they were never a significant hub of electronics at any point in their history, so when you add in the devastation of first WW1, then the RCW, then WW2, they were largely starting way behind. I've seen some papers comparing radar developments during WW2 for each of the great powers and even Japan was well ahead of the USSR even by 1945, despite Japan being behind all the other major powers. With the horrible pervasive police state in the USSR and Stalin's repeated purges, the Soviets were probably the best at counterintelligence in world history, but were simply destroying their ability to develop the necessary pool of talent and distributed knowledge to have a world class electronics industry.
 
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