
But you can look at the question differently: would Russia receive this absolute Shield if it were not for the October 1917 of the year? Could bourgeois Russia, in just a third of a century, be able to develop in scientific, technical and industrial terms, so that by the end of the 1940s, it would be possible not a Soviet, but a Russian nuclear bomb?
TSARISM: NOT A POWERFUL SCIENCE, NO NEED PERSONNEL
The well-known Leonid Mlechin 10 January 2017, in an interview with the host of the program "Reflections" on the OTR channel, stated that if it weren’t World War I, then we now would have a constitutional monarchy and a portrait of the sovereign would hang here.
For all historical the ignorance of this particular statement itself an alternative approach to the analysis of the past is quite legitimate and scientifically sound. And so we ask ourselves: could a monarchist Russia or Russia, stuck in February 1917 and not resolved in October 1917, become nuclear?
Today it is sometimes remembered that the Russian industrialists Ryabushinsky showed interest in the radium problem and interacted with academician Vernadsky. However, anyone who wants to know the exact state of things, can, getting acquainted with the pre-revolutionary history of Russian industry, can easily be convinced that even the large capital of tsarist Russia was by no means progressive, not directed toward the future. The same Ryabushinsky were, above all, manufactories - like most of their fellow tribesmen, who were pumping profits from Russian lands and from the Russian masses. As for the pioneering, knowledge-intensive industries, tsarist Russia was idly trailing behind, and this was not due to lack of talent in Russia, but to the primitive and anti-Russian essence of the then "elite" - both the tsarist administrative and the bourgeois economic.
Let us turn to the origins of scientific and technological progress.
In 1831, the Englishman Michael Faraday invented the dynamo machine - an electric current generator. In 1839, the American Charles Gudiyr discovered the process of rubber vulcanization, which made it possible to introduce rubber into widespread use, including in electrical engineering. From the beginning of the 1840-s, the German Ernst Werner Siemens was involved in electroforming. In May, the first long-distance communication between Washington and Baltimore was established in the United States - 1844 kilometers through the Morse electromechanical telegraph. In Europe and America, the electric age began.
But Russia could quickly become a mighty electric power! Moreover, this opportunity was associated, among others, with two specific names of subjects of the Russian Empire - Boris Jacobi and Emilia Lenz.
The distinguished electrical physicist Moritz Herman Jacobi (1801 – 1874), who became Boris Semenovich, was born in Potsdam, studied in Göttingen, worked in Königsberg, from 1835 year - after moving to Russia, began working at Dorpat University, and from 1837 year to end of life - in St. Petersburg. Boris Semenovich considered Russia to be his second fatherland, and it was here that he made all his major inventions and discoveries.
Jacobi was a talented “applied” scientist and engineer - the perfect combination for the development of new branches of technology! In 1834, he designed the first electric motor, and later successfully developed the issues of telegraphy, electrochemistry and electroforming, electromagnets, mine electrical engineering, electrical measurements, design and production of underground and submarine cables.
Jacobi designed electrical devices, developed more than 10 types of telegraph devices, including direct printing. He gave a lot of energy to the production of electrical engineering education in Russia, but ...
But, for example, its switch-mode synchronous-in-phase telegraph electromagnetic devices are widely used in ... Germany. Ernst Siemens - not only a capable inventor, but also a clever entrepreneur, using the ideas of Jacobi, received a patent in Prussia and, together with the mechanic Galske, began to carry out orders for carrying out telegraph lines. However, Siemens also began electroplating also not without acquaintance with the works of Jacobi, since the latter published a full description of the electroforming process as early as 1840, deliberately not taking a patent and passing his invention for general use.
Back in 1841 – 1842, Jacobi spent in St. Petersburg — one of the first cable lines in the world — the Winter Palace — the Main Headquarters and the Winter Palace — the General Directorate of Communications, and in 1843, the cable line from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoye Selo, 25 kilometers in length. However, Jacobi was a scientist, not a businessman, and as a result, the telegraph lines connecting Petersburg with Warsaw, Revel (Tallinn), Helsingfors (Helsinki), and a number of others in Russia in the 1854 (Helsinki), and Siemens were laying in Russia.
The large profits from these projects, and especially the laying of the telegraph Petersburg Petersburg - Sevastopol during the Crimean War, allowed Siemens to open a large plant instead of a small Berlin workshop, marking the beginning of the future electrical engineering concern Siemens-Halsk. So Europe in the Russian hump drove into the electric age.
But after all, Nikolaev Russia had in those years not only Boris Jacobi, but also Emilia Lenz (1804 – 1865) - also an outstanding physicist! And the list, as they say, can go on and on - after all, even Yablochkov, Lodygin, Dolivo-Dobrovolsky are not mentioned above ...
Let us take an example from a related pioneer branch of science and technology ... The world history of radio engineering and radio electronics begins, in fact, with the beginning of the twentieth century, although Alexander Stepanovich Popov made his first radio experience with the radio on May 7 of the year. And this is what the 1895 Military History Magazine No. 5 reports to us for a year, where, in an article on the role of the creator of radio, A.S. Popov and the birth of radio communications in the Russian army said the following (for the vastness of quotations I do not ask for forgiveness):
“The fact and circumstances of the emergence and widespread use of radio in the Russian Navy are generally recognized and thoroughly studied. navy. Despite the efforts of A.S. Popov and his followers and associates, officials of the Maritime Department, to the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. in Russia, an industrial base for the manufacture of radio communications was not formed ... Already during the above-mentioned war, the leadership of the Maritime Department was forced to feverishly take urgent measures ... Paradoxically (in fact, it is quite logical for tsarist Russia! - SB) , but the handiwork of the domestic inventor was at that time under the control of foreign suppliers, primarily the German company Telefunken. With her, it was necessary to conclude an unprofitable, but necessary contract for the supply of innovation ... "
And further:
“The situation with the development of radio engineering has changed dramatically in literally 2 – 3 of the year. If before that A.S. Popov in the letters of A.N. Rybkin (Popov’s closest assistant - S.B.), sent from Germany and France, noted that in these countries there is nothing new and that domestic developers are not lagging behind foreign developers, then already in 1900 – 1901. it was possible to observe otherwise: domestic innovative thought lagged behind foreign. Thus, due to the lack of adequate support from the state and the production base in Russia, the radio equipment was slowly improved. At the same time, the government of Germany and England paid maximum attention to this problem. In these countries, substantial funds were allocated, work was carried out at the best electrical plants, special laboratories were created, the best specialists who showed themselves in the new field of technology were involved in the developments ... "
The same depressing was the picture in the field of instrument-making, fine mechanics, fine industrial chemistry, materials science, nonferrous and rare metals metallurgy, development and production of equipment for scientific experiments ...
At the same time, the tops of Tsarist Russia behaved foolishly and criminally in relation not only to the scientific and industrial base of the emerging modern industries, but also to those who create all this - to the scientific and technical personnel.
Here are two more quotes from articles by Academician Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky.
The first is from the article “On the professorial congress”, published in the 3 No. of the liberal newspaper Our Days from 20 in December 1904:
“Professors of higher educational institutions - universities and technical institutes - nowhere in the civilized world are currently placed in such a humiliating position as in Russia. Over the past decades ... only the position of teachers in a university relic - in a forgotten scholastic university of the Philippine Islands, could be compared with the legal status of professors of the great Russian people.
... The attitude of the state authorities towards them ... is in complete contradiction with the place that a professor should occupy in the life of his people, sharply violates the living state needs of the country.
Russian professor is under special police supervision. Each of his steps and each word that he carelessly said may cause and cause ... cessation of professorship, constraint, and sometimes many years of weakening of his scientific work ... "
And the second is from the article “Razgrom”, published in the 43 number of the newspaper Russkie Vedomosti from February 23 of the year 1911:
“Our century - the twentieth century - is a century of science and knowledge. Every year, every day, the power of knowledge increases in all areas of life, thought, social, home, state-building. It captures all aspects of human existence. And there is no doubt that the great historical process is just beginning ...
In this age, in our time, state power and state power can be strong only in close union with science and knowledge. In the merciless struggle of states and societies, win and win are those on whose side is science and knowledge, who know how to create cadres of workers who own the latest successes of technology and precise thinking ...

Above the high school, the experiment of “solid power” is manifested. He led to the inevitable departure from her hundreds of teachers ... "
RUSSIA RYABUSHINSKY - ADVANCE SECOND GRADE
Could such a tsarist Russia become not only the second nuclear power of the world, but in general - nuclear and in the twentieth century, thereby protecting itself from possible aggression or forceful dictation? The question should be clearly attributed to the rhetorical, that is, the answer is not requiring. But, perhaps, that failed constitutional monarchy, which Mlechin longs for and which the Ryabushinskys want, would be capable of?
Well, here's another quote - from the notes of Mikhail Ryabushinsky, who was trying to take the Russian market into the hands of ... flax. Ryabushinsky recalled: “How lightning came to me ... thoughts. Russia produces 80% of the world's raw materials for flax, but the market is not in the hands of Russians. We will capture it and make it a monopoly of Russia ... It is said, done. " However, it was not so easy to do it. Even the Ryabushinskaya brothers, who were powerful in Tsarist Russia, started the “flax” project in 1908 and, having spent a lot of effort, were able to concentrate no more than 1917% of Russian linen factories by 18 in their hands.
But before the First World War, the Russian economy was successfully tidied up by Western Europe, and if that changed during the war, it was in the sense that the US capital was intensively introduced into the economy of Russia, like in Western Europe, and in November 1916 of the year the same Mikhail Ryabushinsky in the note “Purpose of our work” lamented:
“We are experiencing the fall of Europe and the rise of the United States. The Americans took our money, entangled us with enormous debts, enriched themselves immeasurably ... The fall of Europe and the cession of its primacy in the world to another continent - after so much heroism, genius, perseverance and intelligence shown by old Europe ... "
Ryabushinsky further expressed the hope that Europe "will find the strength to revive again" and that in this case Russia will also have the opportunity to develop its productive forces and enter the "broad road of national prosperity and wealth." However, not the manufacturers and bankers Ryabushinsky, who profused the Russia they had, had such a gulliver task. The “old” Europe - even entangled with “colossal debts” to America, firmly held the Romanovs' Russia by the throat with no less enormous debts! And this is not counting Russian debts to America.
Could the bourgeois Russia of the Ryabushinskys be able to - if it were to replace the Romanovs' Russia, it would take the broad road of national flourishing, first-class industrial power, advanced science and technology?
Soviet science researcher Professor Lauren Graham from the USA wrote in 1980-ies:
“The 1917 revolutions occurred in a country in critical condition. In general, the Soviet Union was a backward and underdeveloped country, for which the early resolution of major economic problems was vital. As is often the case in the underdeveloped countries, which still have a small layer of highly educated specialists, Russia's previous scientific tradition was primarily of a theoretical nature. ”
Here is a digital illustration of this general thesis: in 1913, Russian universities released 2624 lawyer, 236 clerics and all 65 communication engineers, 208 - railway engineers, 166 mining engineers, a hundred builders (together with architects). And even the engineers of factory production were released a little over 2000. Just!
Would the virtual “constitutional monarchical” Russia of the Ryabushinskys provide not only an industrial, scientific and technical, but also a personnel base for effective nuclear work?
This is also a rhetorical question. Only the socialist Soviet Union was able to deliver and solve the task of the country's civilizational transformation.
Already Lenin looked at it this way:
“We will go our own way, trying to test and recognize the real organizers, people with a sober mind and practical wisdom, people connecting devotion to socialism with reduction without noise (and despite turmoil and noise) to build strong and friendly work together as carefully and patiently as possible. a large number of people within the Soviet organization. "
The Stalinist 1930s made only one adjustment to this principle: there was no time to test and recognize real organizers “as carefully and patiently as possible”. Time itself recognized them, and the worthless were quickly discarded.
23 June 1931, at a meeting of business executives, Stalin stated:
“No ruling class did without its own intelligentsia ...
The Soviet government took into account this circumstance and opened the doors of higher educational institutions in all branches of the national economy for the people of the working class and the working peasantry ...
If earlier, under capitalism, higher educational institutions were the monarchy of the bargeyuk, now, under the Soviet system, the workers and peasants' youth constitute the dominant force there ... "
How were these words to be perceived and perceived by hundreds of thousands of Soviet students in hundreds of new Soviet universities? The answer is unequivocal: with the desire to master the knowledge as best as possible and to use it as best as possible for the construction of intelligent and beneficial life for all peoples of the USSR.
In the 1928 year, such young enthusiasts, future scientists, engineers, teachers and doctors, there were only 159,8 thousand people for the whole Union - not so much compared to 1913 the year when 112 thousand students studied at universities which then included future bishops with an assembly of lawyers).
But already in the 1932 year, students in the USSR had 594 thousand.
And by the year 1941 - 811,7 thousand people.
This meant that in the ten years before the war, millions of young professionals of the highest qualifications were brought up in the country! And they were all focused on the needs of living life, and all were claimed by it!
A massive reference calendar for 1941 offered young citizens of the USSR to choose from more than seven hundred institutes: industrial and polytechnic, engineering and mechanical, energy, mining, metallurgical, chemical and technological (10 at once!), Construction and architectural, aviation (7!), Food industry and public catering, medical, agricultural, pedagogical, library, economic and many others ... By 1941, the new Russia had six institutes of physical culture - in Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk, Kharkov, Tbilisi and Baku ... And among economic, for example, institutions, planning institutions and institutions of national economic accounting were singled out.
Would Russia have had all this with that “constitutional monarchy”, according to which the former nomenklatura “fighter of the ideological front of the Central Committee of the CPSU” Mlechin and others like him shed tears? But there is one more personal aspect here ... Only the feeling of bewilderment is caused by the position of those who distort the essence of the very epoch that created them. For example, rocket pilot Boris Chertok, who fruitfully worked in Soviet rocket science, but became especially famous for his “post-Soviet” memoirs, “Rockets and People,” wrote in them:
“German firms worked on a host of technical problems on their own initiative, without waiting for instructions from“ above, ”they didn’t need Gosplan solutions or the people's commissariats, without which no factory could produce any products.”
You read and you wonder! So you can write about your own past only when you don’t understand anything in it! The fact that today - without any instructions from above - thousands of factories do not produce any products at all, since they closed or breathed their last, Chertok did not consider a crime. But on the Leninist-Stalinist USSR with its Gosplan economy, the style of which the whole world acquired at one time, Chertok had enough black paint. Describing the German instrument and radio industry, he writes:
"... The firms" Hartmann and Brown "," Telefunken "," Anschütz "," Siemens "," Lorenz ", AEG," Rode-Schwartz "," Askania "," Karl Zeiss "long before World War II used the world fame.
This created a solid technological base, which we did not have at the beginning of the war in these sectors at the right scale ... "
But after all, there was no solid scientific and technical and industrial base of advanced branches of science and technology in the USSR at the beginning of World War II, because by the 1917 year in the Russian Empire there was no such base at all! I remind it for everyone who is "forgotten"!
And the fault is not only on the tsar and his dignitaries indifferent to science and technology, but also on resourceful businessmen like the Ryabushinskys and Tereshchenko. Russian businessmen made capital on highly profitable textile, sugar, etc. industry, but did not complain troublesome advanced industry!
Chertok, reproaching either Stalin or the Stalin era as a whole, declared:
“Our general-purpose electrical appliance industry, the aviation instrumentation industry and, finally, marine instrument-making industry were kept only at several plants in Moscow and Leningrad (Elektropribor, Teplopribor, Svetlana in Leningrad, Aviribor, Lepse, Electrozavod and Manometer "in Moscow).
It is significant that when, after the war, we began to reproduce (with bast shoes and snot, we must assume. —S.B.) the V-2 technique and develop our own rockets, we were convinced that such a device was invented by mankind long ago (what an inappropriate irony! -SB .), as an electrical multi-contact relay, only one Leningrad factory "Red Dawn" can do in our country. In Germany, only the Telefunken company had three similar factories and at least two at Siemens ... "
But could it have been - all the more so after the hardest war, otherwise? After all, when the foundations of a future powerful radio engineering, electrical, instrument-making industry were laid in the world, the situation in Russia was determined not by the Bolsheviks, but by the team of the “beloved monarch” and “God's anointed” Emperor Nicholas II.
However, bourgeois Russia, in a deplorable situation in the sphere of pioneering industries, could not change anything either in personnel, in scientific or technical, or in industrial terms. Failure of the Russian Ryabushinskys was prepared for one fate - a half-resource appendage of the West and the USA. But the nuclear status of the United States, which would have become a reality without the Second World War, would only consolidate the subordinate position of a nuclear-free bourgeois Russia.
NUCLEAR RUSSIA - THE CREATION OF THE DISSOLVATED PEOPLE
In 1930, Stalin warned Russia that it had lagged behind developed countries for a century. And after 10 years, Russia was a different country, and this unprecedented, unprecedented, previously creative work was performed primarily by young enthusiasts, headed by the Soviet scientific and technical youth, yesterday's workers.
Rabfak is a long-forgotten word ... But if all Russian literature came out of Gogol's Overcoat, then a significant part of the Soviet engineering corps came out of the working faculties — the workers' faculties at the higher educational institutions of the USSR.
Say, in 1926, Nikolai Leonidovich Dukhov, the future creator, studied at the faculty of Kharkov Geodetic Institute tanks “Klim Voroshilov” (KV) and “Joseph Stalin” (IS), the chief designer of the Ural Tankograd war era, the future three times Hero of Socialist Labor, two Stars of which were already received for the Atomic problem.
The future first director of the USSR’s first nuclear weapons development center at Arzamas-16, twice Hero of Socialist Labor Pavel Mikhailovich Zernov and founder of the powerful school of design breeders, Hero of Socialist Labor Professor David Fishman, began their work with the atomic problem. However, for that era, this was the rule rather than the exception.
This is the foundation on which Russia's nuclear power was laid.
At the beginning of the 1950s, at the direction of Stalin and Beria, he prepared for an open publication a report on the history of the mastery of atomic energy in the USSR. After the murder of Stalin and Beria, this idea was buried in the archives, and the draft version of the report was declassified only in zero years.
Here is a small extract from it concerning only one aspect of the Atomic Problem - the development of new instruments:
“The work of physicists, chemists, and engineers required a wide variety of instruments. Many instruments of high sensitivity, high precision were required ...
The work of modern industrial enterprises is unthinkable without continuous monitoring of technological processes of production ...
... It was necessary to install about 8 thousand of various kinds of devices for only one nuclear boiler together with the water industry and water purification ...
<...>
The country's instrument engineering has not yet recovered from the just ended war with Hitler Germany. Instrument making in Leningrad, Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev and other cities has not yet been fully restored after the war years. The immense destruction caused by the war made it impossible to quickly obtain the necessary equipment from the factories. It was necessary to quickly restore the destroyed factories and build new ones.
New requirements for precision instruments created new difficulties; the industry had not previously manufactured such precision instruments. Many hundreds of devices needed to be developed anew.
Among these devices there were a lot of completely new devices working on completely new principles that were not previously used in the world instrument engineering ...
... Along with the work on the creation of instrumentation and various kinds of regulators, a series of special manipulators were designed and manufactured ... The manipulator reproduces certain movements of human hands and allows you to perform subtle and complex operations ...
... During the time from 1946 to 1952, the instrument-making plants produced for work in the field of atomic energy 135,5 thousand devices of new designs and more 230 thousand standard devices ...
In the US, a large number of firms were involved in the design and manufacture of instruments. Only the manufacture of instruments for measuring and controlling nuclear radiation in the United States was taken up by 78 firms ...
Long-term relationships with instrument-making firms in Germany, England, France, Switzerland made it easier for US specialists to design new instruments. <...>
The instrument-making industry of the Soviet Union was somewhat lagging behind in its development compared with other industries. This industry in the Soviet Union is the youngest industry ... "
As we see, by the end of 1940's, powerful advanced industries in Russia became a reality, and this ensured the success of the Atomic, Rocket and Space Projects. The peoples of the socialist Soviet Union were able to accomplish all this, but none of these ambitious breakthrough projects would have been bourgeois under the power of Russia.
If we are objective, we will have to admit that today the system situation of the 1917 of the year is repeated in a number of essential moments. With the only difference that by the 1917 year, tsarist Russia was poorly industrialized and did not have high-tech industries, and by the 2017 year Russia was largely deindustrialized, and this is fraught with disastrous consequences. So, for example, in Moscow, on the site of the famous plants created by the Soviet era - the same Kaliber plant, today there are shopping or entertainment centers. The machine tool industry is criminally defeated, in the negligence of the Academy of Sciences, to which October has given a powerful impetus to the development since the beginning of the 1930s. However, is it worth it to continue the martyrology of the domestic high-tech industry and the science itself?
At the same time, we will not be able to get on the road to new power and prosperity if the year of the October 100 anniversary is not the year of its objective assessment, but a year of a destructive, hazy ohah of its outstanding value and a crucial role in creating a great, powerful, united and indivisible Russia. Russia not only Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, but also Russia Igor Kurchatov and Mstislav Keldysh, Sergey Korolev and Vladimir Ilyushin, Yuli Khariton and Yuri Gagarin ... Of eternal Russia Ivanov and Mari.