The Amazing Stuff

The Soviet Union was one of the most repressive and deadly regimes in history, and many outright atrocities were committed against the Soviet people through the years. But even the worst governments may do something right. For the Soviet Union, most of these things were a huge contradiction to other Soviet policies.

10 Active Women In Politics

The Soviet Union was ahead of the West in women’s rights. Although many of their rights were given out of necessity, Soviet women had more opportunity in employment and politics than Western women for most of the 20th century.

By law, women in the Soviet Union had the same employment opportunities as men and tended to work in jobs that Western women couldn’t. However, that was a double-edged sword because Soviet culture also demanded that women take care of housekeeping after their day jobs. As a result, women spent more time working than men.

Soviet women were also better represented in politics than Western women, especially in the early 20th century. In the 1920s, 600 Soviet women were chairmen (similar to mayors) of their towns and villages and almost 6.5 million were politically active.

Soviet women also served in military combat roles long before their Western counterparts, with many women gaining notoriety as snipers and fighter pilots during World War II.

The perceived rights of women in the USSR influenced suffrage movements in the West. In 1917, the Soviet Union granted women the right to vote. It’s debatable how much of a right this actually was, but Soviet suffrage was attractive to some Western feminists. The fear of having women become Soviet sympathizers was one of the many reasons that women were granted the right to vote in the US and other Western countries.

9 Effective Public Transit

Most people in the Soviet Union did not own cars, which meant that the government had to offer public transit for its citizens out of necessity. Public transit was extremely cheap and even free in some cases. Generally, it got people where they needed to go.

Although the Soviet public transit system was slow and uncomfortable at times, it became a huge part of Soviet life. Major cities such as Moscow also had easy-to-use metro systems, which had some of the most beautiful stops in the world.

The Soviet rail system was also excellent. It transported far more material than the US railway system of the same era. Since the Soviets tended to have more rail lines than the US, it was easier for Soviet citizens to travel from city to city but not out of the country.

8 Free Vacations

Shockingly, the Soviet Union encouraged tourism within its borders. By law, workers got two weeks off from work every year and were given vouchers to travel to certain tourist destinations, including Sochi. Vouchers to Sochi were given either in the winter or the summer.

Unfortunately, corruption crept into the system, with high-ranking officials consistently getting prime vacation times during the summer. But overall, the Soviet Union emphasized vacations as a part of communist life.

The use of free vacations played a practical role for Soviet leaders. First, it was an attempt to ensure loyalty by giving people some positive impressions about the government. Second, it gave the Soviet people a feeling of independence and empowerment, which was sorely missing from other aspects of their lives. Third, it allowed workers to rest and recover from their jobs, which was meant to ensure peak production when they returned to work.

New mothers also received free maternity leave as part of the Soviet health insurance system. This allowed mothers to take time off with their babies while having access to necessary medical care.

7 Montage Theory In Film

Soviet films were one of the high points of the regime, but it is impossible to overstate how important those films were to modern filmmaking. One of their biggest impacts was the montage theory of editing, which was propelled by Sergei Eisenstein through his various movies.

The montage theory simply states that movies are actually made in the editing process. It is the juxtaposition of shots that drives emotion and makes a movie unique.

This theory spawned the film art of editing, which is still influential today. Older movies generally had long shots that did not use different editing styles. But Eisenstein’s films used different shot lengths and the juxtaposition of different images to drive the narrative in his movies, making them interesting and exciting for audiences.

The impact of his work is seen all through the film industry today. Action movies use quick cuts while more serious movies use somber techniques. Almost every film today owes something to Eisenstein’s montage theories.

Montage theory also influenced Soviet filmmakers to try other experiments with film. For example, experimental filmmaker Lev Kuleshov showed that editing can elicit different emotions in the audience even when using the same shots. In one of his films, he placed a shot of a man with a blank face between various images, such as bowls of soup and dead babies.

Audiences praised the actor’s subtle performance in demonstrating different emotions like sadness or hunger, even though his face never changed. In 1964, Alfred Hitchcock praised this technique, calling it the essence of filmmaking.

The Kuleshov effect shows up in many different films, including the final scene of Star Wars: The Force Awakens where the editing of the shots drives the emotions of the scene. In a way, the Soviet filmmakers invented modern cinema.

6 First Country In Europe To Support Reproductive Rights

In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country in Europe to completely legalize abortions for women. It was not until 1936 that another European country caught up to the Soviet Union. That was the year that Iceland legalized abortions.

At that time, abortions were considered the main form of contraception, which is different from modern trends. But it did place the Soviet Union at the forefront of reproductive rights at the time.

Like many things in the Soviet Union, reproductive rights suffered during the Stalin era. Concerned with low population growth, Stalin outlawed abortions in 1936, just as Iceland was legalizing them.

In 1955, Soviet women were permitted to have abortions again. At the time, this was a limited right, only applying in cases where the mother’s life was in jeopardy. Later, universal reproductive rights were reestablished.

Soviet abortion policy was seen as following Leninist ideologies, which promoted the idea that a woman should not be forced to have an unwanted baby. Over time, abortions became increasingly commonplace in the Soviet Union, with most women having at least one during their lifetimes. Still, the Soviet Union was at the forefront of reproductive rights legislation in Europe.

5 Effective Recycling Program

For a country that had huge issues with environmental contamination, the Soviet Union and its puppet states had a large-scale recycling program for their citizens. In the 1970s, Soviet leaders began to set up recycling services that were extensive for the time, even if most people took a while to use them.

Twenty Soviet cities had major recycling plants for paper, with almost 30 percent of all paper recycled in the Soviet Union during the 1980s. Compared to the 270 kilograms (600 lb) of paper used by Americans per capita in 1989, people in the former Soviet Union only used about 10 kilograms (25 lb) per capita that year.

This was partly due to the Soviet culture of reusing material. Soviet citizens also had access to glass recycling centers that sometimes paid them to return glass bottles.

During the Soviet regime, plastic was rarely used in consumer goods. Plastic bags did not appear until the 1980s. For most of the Soviet years, people reused their bags or used their own containers when shopping for food. Plastic bottles were also uncommon, with most bottles made of glass and easily recyclable. This reduced the amount of waste produced by the average citizen and compared favorably to other industrial countries.

4 Ostensible Support For Anticolonialism

Part of the Soviet strategy was a strict rejection of Western colonialism. To this end, they spent money and time aiding third-world countries in their battles for independence against colonial forces.

The Soviet Union provided most of this aid to countries in Africa, which worked to gain freedom from colonial forces through most of the Cold War. Aid often took the form of weaponry and technical help for warring nations.

One of the most profound examples of help occurred when the Soviets provided support for India’s independence. The two countries forged an alliance that continued throughout the Cold War and allowed India to stay independent.

Some politicians and historians disagree on whether Soviet anticolonial aid was a good thing or a bad thing. But it generally allowed these countries to gain independence that they otherwise would not have achieved.

The dark side of this aid was that Soviet foreign policies were just as colonial as Western policies. They often treated countries in their Central European zones of control as Soviet colonies.

In hindsight, the colonial aspects of Soviet foreign policy are clear. But it is also clear that the Soviet Union helped many countries to gain their independence from other colonial masters.

3 Effective Industrialization

Before the rise of the Soviet Union, Russia was mostly an agrarian country that did not have an effective industrial economy. In this way, it lagged far behind other countries in Europe. However, one of the most important things that the Soviet regime did for its country was to bring it into the modern world.

During the Stalin era, the Soviet Union underwent a massive industrialization process. The minor economy of the tsarist era was transformed into an industrial powerhouse that rivaled other first-world countries.

All of this happened in the 10-year period from 1928 to 1938. Overall, the Soviet Union industrialized at a faster rate than any other country previously had, which improved the lifestyles of its citizens.

Between 1929 and 1934, the Soviet Union achieved a 50 percent increase in industrial growth and an average annual growth rate of 18 percent, which was an unprecedented leap in output.

Of course, the news wasn’t all good. Many products manufactured in the Soviet Union were of low quality. But industrialization helped the USSR to become a first-world country. Former Soviet states like Russia and Ukraine became effective world economies.

2 Free Education

The Soviet Union emphasized education, especially in science and engineering. Soviet law guaranteed all citizens a free education regardless of their social standing or income.

Unlike other countries at the time, this education extended to college and postgraduate work. Some people received their doctorates without paying tuition. The education plan covered all costs of attending school, including textbooks and school supplies.

The Soviets also built universities and extended the possibility of education to developing republics in the USSR where education had previously been unavailable. For example, Belarus had no universities before the Soviet Union existed. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Belarus had 22 universities.

The effectiveness of the Soviet education system is clear from the number of great scientists and mathematicians that came out of the country.

1 Drug-Free Neighborhoods

Throughout its history, the Soviet Union had strict drug control, which became more repressive over time. This was the opposite of the trends in the West. Soviet policies focused on criminalization of drug use and did not do much with drug rehabilitation or addiction recovery. But it did result in essentially drug-free neighborhoods.

Soviet politicians and writers considered drug use to be a decadence caused by capitalism. As a result, the Soviets went to great lengths to stop any drugs, including the full list of drugs cataloged by the UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. This included strict bans on opiates.

Of course, there were still drug users in the Soviet Union. But their number was incredibly small, mainly confined to elitists and people in prison. Both groups got their drugs from gypsies who smuggled them into the country.

In the 1980s, the Soviet government had much more difficulty controlling the influx of drugs, which caused a surge in the drug culture. Most of these new users were young people who saw drugs as a way to imitate Western culture.

Increased drug use also came from Soviet soldiers returning from Afghanistan, where they first took illegal narcotics. When the Soviet Union fell, the drug control laws did as well, leaving Russia with the narcotics problem that it has today.

Fictional supervillain plots are just that: fictional. Except that some of the things that governments and even individuals have managed to pull off are just as outlandish as the things we’ve seen in James Bond movies. Here are 10 of these supervillain projects from around the world.

A Secret Nuclear Smuggling Network

There are smuggling networks and black market operations which deal in exotic things like animal furs and illicit drugs, but there has probably never been a black market network quite like the one run by Abdul Qadeer Khan. It dealt in information on how to build nuclear weapons as well as the actual nuclear material and equipment to make those weapons.

While countries have peddled nuclear secrets before, Khan is the first individual to have ever built a business providing these services. However, unlike a supervillain in a Bond movie, he didn’t face a dashing MI6 agent trying to stop him. Western intelligence agencies purposely overlooked Pakistan’s nuclear program for years and missed Khan’s nuclear network as well.

Khan is considered the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program and is revered in Pakistan as a hero. While working in Europe, he stole two designs for nuclear centrifuges and brought them back to Pakistan, using these designs to advance Pakistan’s then-fledgling nuclear program.

In the early 1990s, he tried to sell the nuclear technologies Pakistan had used to make a nuclear weapon. Deals were signed with Libya, Iran, and North Korea for Khan’s networks to provide centrifuge parts, bomb material, and a complete blueprint for a compact nuclear warhead that could fit on a missile. Khan appears to have grown rich and egotistical on the profits from his sales, and Pakistani politicians were none the wiser.

The entire network started to unravel when shipments of nuclear weapons to Libya were uncovered in 2003. Further findings implicated Khan, including documents wrapped in bags from an Islamabad dry cleaning company. In 2004, Khan gave a public confession and was put under house arrest in Pakistan—a mere slap on the wrist because he was released just five years later.

Anthrax In World War II

Dropping biological weapons over an entire nation to starve their populace sounds like something so evil that only a supervillain would advocate for it. During World War II, someone did strongly advocate for such a thing, but it wasn’t Adolf Hitler. It was Winston Churchill championing Operation Vegetarian.

The plan involved British bombers dropping anthrax-contaminated cattle feed over Nazi Germany. The German cows would eat the anthrax and die, depriving the Germans of all their livestock. Starvation would occur rapidly, with more deaths caused by the anthrax infecting humans.

To accomplish this massive undertaking, the British needed to manufacture and inject anthrax into five million linseed cakes. Then bombers would have to be modified to drop this unusual payload. However, smaller tests showed that the project was feasible.

Churchill overruled the concerns of several top scientists and ordered 500,000 anthrax-laced cakes from America in 1944, but World War II ended before the plan could be put into action. Although more tests were conducted on isolated islands as late as the 1950s, the British government favored nuclear weapons, which were far more practical. Postwar development of Operation Vegetarian was not pursued.

The CIA Mining Operation

In 1968, the Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129 suffered an accident and sunk into the crushing depths of the Pacific Ocean. A major loss for the Soviet Union, this represented a golden opportunity for the CIA, which could finally get its hands on Soviet missile technology.

There was just one small problem: The submarine was about 5,000 meters (16,000 ft) underwater. The CIA responded with a massive operation that would have made any supervillain proud. In complete secrecy, they attempted to raise the entire ship from the depths in an operation called Project Azorian.

To cover up the operation, the CIA approached billionaire Howard Hughes, who agreed to help. A massive ship, the Glomar Explorer, was built and ostensibly funded by Hughes, who announced that his new ship would mine the sea floor for the valuable mineral manganese. In fact, the CIA had secretly provided Hughes with the money to build the ship, and its real purpose was to use a gigantic claw to retrieve the sunken Soviet submarine.

Constructed from 1970–1974, the ship finally arrived at the site of the sunken submarine in July 1974. For over one month, the ship attempted to raise the submarine in complete secrecy while curious Soviet ships looked on. In the end, the mission was not entirely successful, with part of the submarine breaking off and sinking back into the depths. No nuclear missiles were recovered.

Before the Americans could try again, the entire operation was exposed in a strange series of events. Paranoid about a mundane burglary which had coincidentally made off with secret Azorian documents, the CIA enlisted the help of the FBI, which attracted media attention. Eventually, someone in the government leaked the entire operation, and the Soviets sent a warship to guard the remains of their submarine. Further salvage operations were canceled. The Glomar Explorer sat gathering dust until the 1990s, when it was purchased for oil drilling. The ship has now been scrapped.

Control Of The World Copper Market

In some Bond movies, supervillains want to control the supply of a specific commodity, with Goldfinger being a well-known example. In the mid-1980s, a Japanese trader tried to do the same thing with copper, but he didn’t need nuclear weapons to do it.

Yasuo Hamanaka, working for the Sumimoto Corporation, was once known as “Mr. Five Percent” because he controlled approximately that much of the world’s copper supply at the time. Although that doesn’t sound like a lot, copper, unlike gold, is constantly being used up. It is also difficult to move copper to where there are shortages, so prices that rise due to a copper shortage do not necessarily reverse quickly. These factors, along with Hamanaka being the biggest holder of copper at that time, gave him a huge amount of influence over the global copper market.

He used this influence to keep the price of copper high for over a decade, earning a huge amount of money in the process. He accumulated a lot of his copper in secret deals. But for years, the fluctuations in copper prices were explained away and were never linked to his influence, despite increasingly vocal complaints by other copper traders.

However, real-life business isn’t like the movies, and Hamanaka’s plans for world copper domination came to an abrupt end in 1996. Increased market regulations made his position untenable. When he tried to secretly buy up more copper, he was busted.

Everything quickly unraveled from there. Sumimoto fired Hamanaka, and he was jailed for fraud. Then Sumimoto learned they had been left with nearly $2 billion in debt as the price of copper (and all of Sumimoto’s massive copper holdings) went into free fall.

Saddam Hussein’s Supergun

In the late 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein wanted a weapon that could strike farther than any he had in his arsenal at the time. So like a Bond villain, he turned to outsize ideas.

Saddam commissioned Canadian physicist and engineer Gerald Bull, who specialized in long-range artillery and had worked for Iraq in the past, to build a gigantic supergun called the Babylon gun. This weapon would fire artillery shells thousands of kilometers and would be able to fire satellites into orbit.

The final gun design had a barrel 150 meters (500 ft) long with a diameter of 1 meter (3 ft). It was expected to launch a 600-kilogram (1,300 lb) projectile 1,000 kilometers (600 mi) using 9 metric tons of special propellant. The recoil of the gun would have been enormous, registering on seismic sensors around the world. Iraqi defector General Hussein Kamel al-Majeed claimed that Saddam planned several missions for the gun, including launching nuclear weapons and shooting down satellites.

A smaller, 350 mm prototype of the supergun was built. But before construction on the larger gun could begin, Bull was killed by the Israelis in 1990 because he was working to improve Iraq’s more mundane ballistic missiles. The same year, Saddam invaded Kuwait and was crushed by the US. Ultimately, the supergun project was dismantled.

Stealth Satellites

Remember in the Bond film Moonraker where supervillain Hugo Drax had a stealth space station in orbit that was invisible to the US military? The US military actually had such a program—code-named Misty—to secretly deploy stealth satellites into space to spy on enemies. These satellites couldn’t be seen through telescopes or tracked with radar.

The first satellite was launched by a space shuttle in 1990. But just a few days later, the satellite apparently exploded. Believing that this was an ordinary spy satellite, both Russian and American space experts thought that was the end. In fact, the explosion had been faked, and the satellite had deployed a stealth shield to hide itself while the experts were distracted by the explosion.

Less than a year later, however, the satellite was spotted briefly by amateur astronomers while it was maneuvering in space. As late as five years later, other sightings were reported, again by amateurs. The military learned a lesson. When the next Misty satellite was launched in 1999, it contained a decoy that threw off the civilian astronomers for a while.

However, at a cost of nearly $10 billion, these spy satellites weren’t useful enough in real life to justify the massive expense. The project was canceled in 2007.

X-Ray Lasers Powered By Nuclear Explosions

During the Cold War, the US government pursued a superweapon under the aegis of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Called Project Excalibur, it was supposed to use X-ray lasers powered by nuclear weapons to destroy Soviet ballistic missiles. The project was proposed by Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, who believed that a series of these weapons could secure the US against a missile attack by the Soviets.

The weapon consisted of a nuclear weapon with a modified casing containing hundreds of solid lasing mediums. The explosion of the nuclear weapon would dump energy into the mediums, which would be excited and produce intense beams of X-rays, frying a huge number of Soviet missiles with every atomic detonation.

The Outer Space Treaty prohibited nuclear weapons in space, so the X-ray laser devices needed to be stored on the ground. X-rays are also absorbed by the atmosphere after just a short distance, which meant that the devices had to be deployed on rockets in Western nations closer to the Soviet Union, such as Britain.

Ten tests were conducted to see if nuclear explosions could be used to generate X-rays. Although there was some success in later tests, the end of the Cold War also heralded the end of the program. It was canceled in 1992.

An International Villain Organization For Hire

The Bond movie Thunderball introduced SPECTRE, a crime syndicate and terrorist organization for hire that was led by an evil genius. While the real-life Paladin Group didn’t steal nuclear weapons or hold Britain for ransom, they were a mercenary organization founded by the nearly mythical ex-Nazi soldier Otto Skorzeny, who must have been an evil genius to pull off as many feats as he did.

Formed by the scar-faced Skorzeny in the 1960s, the Paladin Group was envisioned as a global organization of mercenaries, who were neither military troops nor civilian spies. The organization specialized in training and equipping unsavory characters. In the geopolitical upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s, there were many dictatorships and failing governments around the world that wanted mercenaries and killers, demands that the Paladin Group was prepared to service.

Unlike SPECTRE, the Paladin Group wasn’t immortal. With the deaths of both Skorzeny and his patron, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, the group appears to have faded into history.

The Balloon Bomb To Destroy Soviet Harvests

The US once had a weapon, the E77 balloon bomb, that could potentially wipe out crops and livestock worldwide using biological agents. Inspired by Japanese balloon attacks on the US during World War II, the Americans combined a harmless leaflet-dropping balloon with a 40-kilogram (80 lb) payload of stem rust disease, which would destroy wheat harvests.

The stem rust was coated on turkey feathers, which would be released when the balloon had risen and then dropped to a predetermined height. Almost 5,000 of these weapons were ordered in 1950, enough to destroy more than 500,000 square kilometers (200,000 mi²) of cropland.

Designed to secretly destroy Soviet or Chinese agriculture, the balloons were tested over a decade and ready to deploy. However, the program was suspended in 1960. Bombs dropped by aircraft had become the favored delivery method of stem rust. As far as we know, all research into biological warfare ended in the US in 1969.

The US Government Is Purposely Spreading Malware

An automated system called TURBINE is spreading the implants and has allowed the NSA to expand their ambitions from just a few hundred priority targets to potentially millions of computer systems. In internal documents, the NSA claims that the system would operate like a human brain, automatically deciding what it would use to retrieve information from compromised computers.

The system is also user-friendly. A human overseer can ask a computer about an application it’s running without being overwhelmed with coding minutiae. The entire villainous operation could put the safety of the Internet at risk, as holes in security created by the TURBINE malware make further intrusions by other organizations and individuals more likely to succeed.

Sam Derwin is just your ordinary, debt-burdened college student struggling to get by!