We could live in a completely different country, according to the level of comfort, prosperity and freedom. With a developed economy and scientific and technical sphere. And there would be much more reasons for pride in their homeland.
Just a few projects, if they were completed and scaled to the whole country, could completely change the USSR.
Soviet Internet
By 1990, the management of the Soviet economy could have been fully computerized. At least 50 thousand leading industrial enterprises and almost the same number of large agricultural enterprises were planned to be linked together by means of computer networks.
The task of building the "Red Internet" - the National Automated Economic Management System (OGAS) was set by the Chairman of the Council of Ministers A. N. Kosygin back in November 1962. At the same time, the first sketches of such a system appeared even before the start of American work on ARPANET (started working in 1969), the forerunner of the modern "bourgeois" Internet.
The work was supervised by the world-renowned mathematician and cyberneticist Victor Glushkov. The first computing centers of the future network, which would unite the management of the army and the national economy, have already been built in Moscow and Leningrad.
The Soviet Union created its own personal computers and servers. Information transfer protocols and friendly user interfaces have been developed. For the first time, hypertext, a system of links that formed the basis of the Internet, was proposed in the USSR. Certain elements of the system were significantly ahead of their time, for example, the introduction of paperless document management.
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All this resembles modern automated systems, "1C", "PARUS", "GALAKTIKA", but not on the scale of individual enterprises, but the whole country.
OGAS would make it possible to manage the national economy more efficiently, to bring gigantic resources under control, to solve many problems that the economy has already begun to experience. In particular, the shortage of consumer goods. However, the project was only partially implemented - in the form of automatic control systems at enterprises. But partial methods did not solve the problem.
But as noted by the American historian Benjamin Peters, the USSR was unable to build the Internet not so much because of a lack of technology, but because of the inability to push such a large-scale project through all the departments whose interests it contradicted.
Soviet "Shinkansen". High speed rail traffic
The creation of high-speed trains in the USSR began in the mid-60s, shortly after Japan managed to launch the first Shinkansen line.
In total, teams of more than 50 research institutes, design organizations and factories took part in the development and creation of the first high-speed Soviet electric train ER200. An experimental train of 6 cars (2 head and 4 motor) left the gates of the Riga Carriage Works in December 1973. However, the launch of high-speed traffic in the country was constantly postponed. At first he was promised, first by 1977 (to the adoption of the Brezhnev Constitution), then - by the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
ER-200 / TASS.
The first high-speed train, completely designed and built in the USSR, set off on its maiden voyage from Leningrad to Moscow only on March 1, 1984. By this time, high-speed trains were already in operation in three countries - Japan, Italy and France.
The ER-200 project was supposed to be transitional. In the future, it was planned to create more advanced high-speed trains. And then new routes that would connect the whole big country followed.
Soviet shuttles
"Buran" became the pinnacle of technical thought. But few people know that, just like the USA (Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavor), the USSR planned to create a series of space shuttles.
Launch of the * Baikal * ship as imagined by the artist / Vadim Lukashevich.
In addition to "Buran" were supposed to fly:
"Tempest", the second flight copy of the first series of orbital ships created in the framework of the Soviet space program "Buran". Was practically prepared for space flight in 1992. The degree of readiness is 95-97%. In his first flight, he was supposed to go to the Mir station.
"Baikal", aka "Product 2.01", "Buran 2.01" is the third flight copy of the orbital ship. "Baikal" was created for more complex and long (multi-day) flights than "Buran". Its flight was scheduled for 1994. At the time of the termination of construction (1993), the degree of product readiness was estimated at 30-50%.
Two more, at that time “nameless” products, “2.02” (readiness 10-20%) and “2.03” (the reserve was destroyed in the shops of the Tushino machine-building plant) were also laid.
Supersonic passenger airliners
Tu-144 is the main miracle of the Soviet aircraft industry. The world's first supersonic aircraft designed to carry passengers. The Tu-144 made its first test flight on December 31, 1968, two months earlier than the Concorde. It could carry from 120 to 150 passengers or up to 15 tons of cargo over a distance of 3500 km at an unprecedented speed of 2500 km / h for passenger aircraft. Tu-144 made its first regular flight "Moscow - Alma-Ata" on November 1, 1977. 16 Tu-144 units were produced. Today, there are 8 units left, which are either in storage or ended up in museums.
Tu-144, business and economy class / TASS.
As it turned out, creating a supersonic passenger airliner is not as difficult as creating a supersonic civil aviation and the related air transportation industry.
"Stalin's" plan for the transformation of nature
The turn of the Siberian rivers to the south, today is perceived as odious, but in the USSR there were also much more reasonable plans for changing the climate and landscape.
The program for the scientific regulation of nature, which has no analogues in world practice, developed on the basis of the works of outstanding Russian agronomists, went down in history as the "Stalin's plan for the transformation of nature."
Like the Great Wall of China, * Stalin's * forest belts are visible from space.
In 1948, when Europe was still recovering its economy from the consequences of a destructive war, in the USSR, on the initiative of I. V. Stalin issued a decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks "On the plan of field-protective afforestation, the introduction of grass crop rotations, the construction of ponds and reservoirs to ensure high sustainable yields in the steppe and forest-steppe regions of the European part of the USSR."
According to the plan, a grandiose offensive against drought began by planting forest shelter plantations, introducing grass-field crop rotations, building ponds and reservoirs.
It sounds dry, but in 15 years 8 large state forest protection belts with a total length of over 5,300 kilometers have been created. On the fields of collective and state farms, protective afforestation with a total area of 5,709 thousand hectares have been created, and by 1955, 44,228 ponds and reservoirs were built on collective and state farms. A large program was launched to create irrigation systems.
However, after 1953, for obvious reasons, the implementation of the plan was curtailed. Many forest belts were cut down, several thousand ponds and reservoirs, which were intended for fish breeding, were abandoned. At the direction of NS Khrushchev, half a thousand forest protection stations created in 1949-1955 were liquidated.
If the plan could be implemented, according to experts, the harvest harvested from an area of over 120 million hectares, protected from the vagaries of nature, would be enough to feed half of the world's inhabitants.
