USSR found water on the moon - in 1976!

[Human No More]

...of course, West Berlin was a 'model' fed by the rest of the USSR simply because of its location, and as such, strategic and symbolic value, much like an inhabited version of North Korea's propaganda village - not representative of general living conditions.

Higher education should never be provided on a quota basis but on a meritocratic basis for those who are able to qualify for and benefit from it. The question of higher education was a dilemma for the USSR - they wanted to say "it's cheap and easy for our people" but didn't want to deal with the result - that it turned intelligent people who might otherwise have just kept their heads down into dissidents who wanted a better life.

Talking about 'Matrixes' and then going on about how ideal the USSR was seems somewhat ironic - by no means was the US/UK/Western Europe perfect, then or now, but they not only survived, but prospered, and let that prosperity be available to the individual rather than Party officials. Perhaps you're thinking wishfully about the USSR.

Ignoring the whole point about resorting to argument form authority since I've said it before and really don't see why it's relevant, I've been to Berlin, to both former West and former East, if you're really interested. Didn't get to speak to people who lived through either, but did visit several related museums, including the one at Checkpoint Charlie. I don't see the relevance though. I'll just add that somewhere people want to live does not need a wall and 'death strip'.

[auroraglacialis]

What I am getting at, HNM is that it should be obvious that both sides of the cold war had a propaganda machine that was working well. The West has survived the cold war, the USSR did not, so the winners propaganda is what is called history afterwards and the loosers propaganda is called propaganda. This does not make those stories about how horrible the USSR was any more realistic. I personally know people who grew up in the Eastern part of Germany (and not only in Berlin, if you declare Berlin a propaganda city, then what about Dresden, Leipzig,...) and I was in Eastern Germany in the year following the fall of the wall and my best friend frequently visited Eastern Germany for Holidays in the 1980ies. I think directly experiencing something and talking to people gives one a benefit of improved judgement. If one sticks to stying inside certain bubbles, that just serves to reenforce ones prejudices. Looking at a Museum that is set up by the former enemy of a state for example will certainly emphasize the negative sides of that enemy in hindsight. I am amazed at what I learn about Germany if I visit other places and listen to what they see in Germany that is not told to the citizens.
For example we have somethign that always was lamented about Eastern Germany - a law that prohibits people with a certain political ideology from working in their profession. In the case of East Germany it was people who disagreed with the socialist party who were shunted or sent to prison - here it is communists. If I would register with a communist political party, including the one that is in the parliament paradoxically, I could not apply for a job as lecturer or scientist in a state funded university or research institute. How exactly is that different from Eastern Germany except an inversion of communist vs capitalist?

And I dont think I am idealizing the USSR, I just refuse to condemn everything they did as stupid, inefficient and nonsensical and to portray the West as gloriously superior. What I say is that both sides had advantages and disadvantages and that we have grown up in the Side that has prevailed (or in your case maybe for most parts after there were two sides at all), so we only learn about the bad sides of the "others" and the "victory" is used as a justification. This is very shortsighted, especially given that I would not even call the West a winner. The prosperity we seem to be seeing is mor most part a material prosperity that is now fpr 4 years in decline. Do you really thing the West has won if you look at Greece, Italy, Spain, the USA, Ireland and even the UK. The UK probably has now enough data available on their people to make the STASI in Eastern Germany envious.

Oh and of course no one would ever call the fence at the southern border of the US or the one they started building in Greece a "wall" - after all it is just a fence and people are only shot if they dont surrender...

And regarding the education, I think the USSR did a rather good job at selecting people who are suited for an education for it. Actually they probably did a better job than the West, because they had a planned economy, so they needed XY people doing a certain job, so they chose the XY best suited people to give them an education. In the West, it depends a lot more on money and luck. If you have the money, you can get a higher education of any sorts you want - with better universities charging more and demanding better grades - and then afterwards you can have connections to get a job or you can totally loose and revert to driving Taxis. There are plenty of highly educated people doing menial jobs in the West. I think this is pretty inefficient. That whole concept of setting more people on a task than is needed for it of course makes it work in a way that the best suited will get it done, but it also leaves the others in that race without anything in the end and basically their work or education goes to waste. That is not efficient overall. It may be efficient from the perspective of the one who wants that task to get done, but not from the perspective of all the people living in that state or country.

[auroraglacialis]

But this is turning again into one of these debates I am sick of, so lets stop there. Fact is in the end, that the USSR had a very advanced space program and that they did a lot of space-related things first. And according to the logic of the competition based world, this means that they were better at it, no matter how they got it done. They had the first probe on the Moon and the first space ships going to Mars and Venus, they had the first satellite, the first man and first woman in space, the first permanent space station,... and obviously it seems they first found water on the moon. I find it sad, that the West just ignores USSR science out of a false sense of superiority. What about that idea that science is without borders and that scientists should work together regardless or political or national borders. Its probably just a nice wish.

[Human No More]

Again, it was never ignored. Nobody wants to rely on someone else's data. Why do you think they kept trying to reach the moon even after Apollo 13, right up until their economy inevitably collapsed?