Quote Originally Posted by nulle View Post
I think that USSR was lagging behind the West partially because its inventors/scientists/etc. did not get fair compensation for their work.
For example Mikhail Kalashnikov - his invention is produced in massive quantities - yet - he does not have any benefit from that.
I'm not sure the USSR was lagging behind the West. It was lagging behind in certain things and was a way ahead in the others. The scientists were compensated worse than their counterparts in the West, however adequately. The problem was not the compensation, but the centralization and as a result the bureaucratization of everything that resisted any innovations. Each bureaucrat had only to report the success up the ladder, so they couldn't take risks. As a result, it was more beneficial for the bureaucracy which led the country to sell raw materials to maintain the best spy organization in the world which would steal and buy new technologies from the West and then copy them and promote to production than to promote the local inventions. The local inventions were reported up the ladder, but rarely experienced practical implementation. That caused the inevitable lag between the invention in the west, trial and error in the west, mass production in the west, success in the west, and ONLY THEN copy in the USSR, trial and error in the USSR, and mass production in the USSR. All that took years. Hence the lag. By the 80s the Soviet-manufactured calculators were displaying the magic word ЕГГОГ which meant nothing in Russian, but everybody knew it meant an error. That situation caused enormous frustration among the scientific community in the USSR hurting the motivation.