Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: On Unz.com, Anatoly Karlin displays an interesting graph of scientists per capita of over 50 Soviet ethnic groups as of 1973.

Not surprisingly, the #1 most scientific ethnicity in the Soviet Union were the Jews and the very last group were the Gypsies, with Gypsies producing about 1/500th as many professional scientists per capita as Jews.

This graph once against demonstrates that UC Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine’s otherwise outstanding 2004 book “The Jewish Century” gets off to a bad start by asserting a conceptual grouping of Jews and Gypsies as “Mercurians.”

There was a lot of petty anti-Semitic career discrimination in the USSR by 1973, so the Jewish advantage in talent was probably even greater than this chart shows.

As I’ve mention many times before, my wife’s late uncle, a USAF colonel with a Ph.D. in metallurgy, used to spy behind the Berlin Wall in the 1970s-1980s with Soviet Jewish rocket scientists who were headed to Israel (or America) after their five year cooling off periods. He’d cross into East Berlin as a tourist and meet a Soviet Jewish scientist who was vacationing in East Berlin who was parked on a dark street and debrief him about what his Soviet counterparts were up to.

I wonder how much of Israel’s economic explosion as a high tech center over the last few decades is driven by the exodus from the old Soviet Union? For example, the rumors in the Israeli press that the FBI contracted with an Israeli firm to break the encryption on the San Bernardino terrorist’s Apple iPhone gets me wondering how much of the Israeli advantage in telecom software these days is due to KGB investments in sigint and codebreaking in the old days …

Our old friends the Chechens are fourth from the bottom in this list.

At the top of the list, Jews are first by a mile, but then come Georgians (e.g., Stalin and Beria — don’t let anybody tell you Stalin was stupid) and Armenians (e.g., the Mikoyan brothers), followed by Russians. I believe there was some affirmative action for the Russian majority, but, still, they’re formidable. Then come Krymchaks, Estonians, Latvians, Tats, Buryats, Ossetians, Lithuanians, Azeris, and Ukrainians.

COMMENTS:

* A lot of Soviet Jews (especially the ambitious ones) and nearly all half Jews were officially registered as Russians, Ukrainians, etc. So the true number of Jews among the Soviet scientists was even higher.

* Americans can’t comprehend what a giant prison the Soviet Union was. Soviet citizens did not just get on a plane and take a vacation in E. Berlin. Even within the East Bloc, travel was restricted and you had to get clearances to go to another country, which were not granted unless you had a damn good reason for going and were considered politically reliable. Such permission was highly sought after because the quantity and quality of consumer goods in the satellites was better than in the SU. Vacations were usually inside the Soviet Union at some Black Sea resort and would typically be arranged thru your work unit.

For someone who had already indicated their disloyalty by applying to go to Israel, such permission was not likely to be forthcoming.

Typically, Soviet Jews exited by way of Vienna or Rome. If I had to guess, your uncle met scientists who were already on their way out of the country and were in transit to Vienna or something like that. But they were most likely NOT on vacation.

Regarding Muslim potential, you have to understand that the Soviets tried damn hard, using Soviet style (ruthless) measures far beyond what could be done in the West to de-Islamify Soviet Muslims and to some extent they succeeded.

* Regarding “petty” anti-Semitic discrimination, it depends what you mean by petty. The math faculty of Moscow State University had a policy not to take Jews, but outright discrimination was illegal. So this was accomplished by giving Jewish applicants special versions of the admission tests that were impossible to pass.

You have to wonder whether such self-defeating tactics contributed to the Soviet Union losing the Cold War. Having most of its top nuclear scientists in Los Alamos instead of Berlin sure didn’t help the German atomic program.

* What is the breakdown among those who actually accomplished or discovered something in their careers? They seem thin on the ground. I’m under the impression that the Soviet Union employed massive numbers of scientists in factory town type conditions where they tortured wheat seeds and tried to create gorilla-man hybrid soldiers. But a whole lot of their technology, and not just military, came from appropriating the new stuff from Europe and America. Not very impressive. Check out their version of the space shuttle.

* Did Russia lose the Cold War in 1991 by dissolving the Soviet State? American neocons certainly seem upset that she doesn’t act like she lost.

There will almost certainly be a coherent nation state called Russia and filled with Russians in 2091. Americans at that time are predicted to be a 25% minority in a US dominated by Mexicans, Chinese, and Indians.

Russia wisely used its so-called loss to dump its most recalcitrant and intractable minorities in 1991 without losing much of anything that is strategic (Balts, Turkmen and Uzbeks, West Ukrainians – bye, bye!). The shape of the frozen conflicts and the Eurasian Customs Union shows you the shape of Russia in 2091.

* The best cryptographers, cryptologists, and computer scientists in information security have been educated at MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, Princeton for more than 30 years. They have been getting grants from and working for the NSA since they were grad students. The Technion is now one of the best schools for this work, but the training their profs had was NSA funded in the US. Overwhelmingly, these scientists are Israeli or American Jews. No KGB necessary.

* I’m a huge Steve Sailer fan and even take the risk of recommending him to people I don’t know to be right-wing, but one things to keep in mind about Steve is that for a guy who coined the term Occam’s Butterknife he isn’t really that careful about avoiding hyper-baroque triple bank shot reasoning himself.

* On balance the movement of people was freer within the USSR than within the US of that time. The number of places with security personnel at the door was orders of magnitude lower in the USSR. A Soviet person expected to be able to enter almost any building without having to explain to anyone why he wanted to do so and without having to show an ID. Usually there was simply no one to show it to. Schools, factories, offices, stores, libraries, etc. were unguarded. The Kremlin was unguarded. You just walked in through one of the towers.

There were no “bad” neighborhoods. That particular restriction on movement was missing.

The propiska system limited movement, but I think that in the psychological sense the two considerations I listed above outweighed it. You generally entered buildings more often than you wanted to permanently move to another part of the country. Also, the propiska system kept the numerous ethnicities of the USSR from being mixed up and assimilated into a giant EU-like gray mass. It promoted ethnic continuity and interethnic peace. So it was actually a good thing. Moscow only began to be filled up with Central Asians once the propiska system was abolished.

* I have worked in Israel a great deal. Most of the top scientists and researchers (who I have met) were overwhelmingly Ashkenazi Israeli born. I was told that many of the Russian Jewish scientists who got out went to or had to leave for America or Canada or the UK because Israel was too small to absorb so many highly educated persons – there simply were not enough teaching positions or spots in industry (especially for mathematicians). The guy who founded WhatsApp and one of the Google guys were children of ex Jewish Soviet but I really doubt that they would have become billionaires in Israel. Maybe the true impact is coming from the ones born in Israel or who arrived as children in the 90s and onward. Has to be a good gene pool.

* This is like the claims about the oft-cited but barely experienced Islamic Golden Age of Science, in which most of the notable scientists of the Arabo-Islamic “Golden Age” turn out to be Persians, Jews, recycled Greeks or Helleno-Egyptians, plagiarized Indians, etc., and often they are of only recent or dubious Muslim-ness. Islam takes the credit–or such credit as is available–for the work of what were really subject peoples.

Islam was originally a minority religion of a conquering warrior elite who lived parasitically on the fruits–literal and figurative–of the conquered. As in the modern Western welfare states, a parasite class can be supported for time, providing that there are sufficient Jizyah-payers to keep the parasites in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. With time, the Jizyah-payers think “enough of this” and convert (nominally) to Islam to live on someone else’s Jizyah. This works until the increasing parasites swamp the diminishing hosts. Then you end up with … well, the Muslim world of the last few centuries: moribund, jealous, internecinely hostile. The only ways for Muslims out of this dead end are either

1) to abandon Islam, or at least the most civilizationally destructive aspects of it, which had been happening in a mild way as the more intelligent Muslims recognized and emulated Western superiority, or

2) to find new lands of dhimmi jizya-payers to begin the whole destructive cycle over again.

Fortunately, after centuries of negative experiences with Islam, today none of Islam’s neighbors is stupid enough to allow hordes of hostile Muslims colonists into their lands … oh, wait!

* Estonians are above Latvians who are above Lithuanians. I first learned about the stereotype of Estonians being the most orderly and efficient Balts, and Lithuanians being the most lackadaisical ones about 20 years ago.

There is a north-south gradient in human capital among farmers’s descendents in many, many regions of Europe and of the world in general. Italy, the former Yugoslavia, Spain, etc. Farming in high latitudes must have selected for intelligence and a lot of other traits.

Relatively small north-south-oriented regions like the Baltic area, Italy and the former Yugoslavia are good test cases because they eliminate a lot of extraneous variables. Ceteris paribus the latitude at which a man’s ancestors ploughed the earth is very important.

* Russian speaking Jews (and a minority of non Jews that pretended to be Jews to get the hell out of an imploding former Soviet landscape) are a formidable presence in Tel Aviv and the tech industry. Generally speaking, I’d much rather live in Moscow than Tel Aviv, but there’s no question that many smart people chose otherwise at some point in time.

Also, though I admire Russian intelligence and culture, I’ve not seen research that has caused me to think that the Russian aristocracy per se nurtured a formidable intellectual prowess – I’d be interested to see if there is some evidence to support this idea. In general, it has always struck me that Russian slavs appear to be brighter in general than white Americans or white British, but to a person these are all people that would have come from merchant, peasant or priest stock.

* A long time ago I read the memoirs of Konstantin Simonov, a famous Soviet writer and an official in the Writer’s Union. Stalin often invited him to talk about literature. Who’s good, who’s bad, in what way, what writers should write about instead, etc. Long conversations like that. The interesting thing is that Stalin didn’t delegate this task. All subsequent Soviet leaders did. He read through large quantities of the lit fic of his time and then talked about it with the authors themselves.

To what extent were Louis XIV, Louis XIII, etc. the authors of the styles that were named after them? I don’t know. I would think that Queen Victoria had almost nothing to do with Victorianism. I’ve read enough about Stalin to know that he was the principal author of his style. The look of central Moscow subway stations, of the 7 sister towers, of the Soviet movies of his time, the feel of the novels, the sound of the popular music, etc. are all reflections of what he personally liked.

Napoleon went in a similar direction I think – restrained imperial grandeur. The Trotskyists whom Stalin defeated were all into avant-garde crap.

* In the movies, it’s always some Nazi who says to the hero, “Papers, please”, but, as noted above, internal passports were a Soviet invention first used to find escaping kulaks.

* Why should the Soviet Union allow a citizen to leave when the state picked up the tab for the health care and education of that citizen? That’s the lesson I take. Don’t allow the state to fund your life from cradle to grave, and maybe the state won’t behave as if you were their property.

You would think Americans of the same ethic background who were adversely affected by this rationale in the USSR would be eager to not have similar conditions arise in the USA. In a sane world Bernie Sanders would have taken this lesson to heart and would not be campaigning on ‘everything is free’. Because in the end everything isn’t free and you’ll end up being owned.

* I think if you ask Sanders, he would tell you that what he has in mind is democratic socialism similar to that practiced in Denmark, not soviet socialism.

All modern economies (the US included) have certain “socialist” aspects. We have free public schools, free pensions and health care for senior citizens, free food for people who don’t make enough to buy their own, subsidized housing for various groups (plus a mortgage interest deduction for almost everyone), government operated mass transit, a government owned postal system, etc. At various times, the US government has owned large part of the railroad industry, the auto industry, etc. Other aspects of the US economy combine the WORST aspects of private industry with government funding in order to maximize inefficiency. Government doesn’t build the $5,000 airplane toilet seat or the $1,000,000 heart operation, it just pays for it, with your money. Some of these things as American as apple pie and people don’t even think of them as being socialist, though they are. The train left the station on “socialism” long before Sanders was born.

* I don’t believe Jews were the liquidated [in the Soviet Union], if by the liquidated you mean the ones targeted for mass collective punishment. I don’t doubt some Jews were maliciously attacked. But if Jews were the target then I’d suspect the Hammer and Sickle would have the status today of the Swastika. I doubt open communist parties with their Soviet style party flags would be treated as respectable in today’s media. Instead their symbols would be banned and their parties treated like the Golden Dawn. Even Max Boot feels OK about voting for Stalin. I doubt he’d say that about Hitler.

* The many ways in which NY is far from being a model of democracy never seems to have worried the NYT much. Widespread corruption, long-running organized crime control of much of the NYC economy and the outrageously gerrymandered NY State Senate were mostly ignored while the NYT was preoccupied with how the world should be remade.

* Churchill agreed that driving out the Jews hurt the Nazi war effort. In the famous speech where he spoke of “the Few” he noted: “Since the Germans drove the Jews out and lowered their technical standards, our science is definitely ahead of theirs.”

But Jewish engineers and scientists definitely helped the Soviets overall – even if quotas lowered Jewish chances in some admissions. One invention by a Jew certainly helped the USSR win against the Nazis. The head designer and engineer of the t-34 tank was a Jew (Mikahil Koshkin) and pretty much everyone says that this was the best tank of the war. Again, there were quotas against Jews in the US in the 1930s but this did not hinder Jewish success or contributions to the US at all. Jews who went to City College won many Nobels. Did it really matter that they did not get into Harvard?

* There was only one top german-jewish physicist working on the Manhattan Project, Hans Bethe, and one top italian physicist (gentile, but with a jewish wife), Enrico Fermi. From Europe, there were a few journeymen scientists like Klaus Fuchs (gentile anti-Nazi), and some second rank talent: Otto Frisch and Edward Teller (although how much he contributed to the success of the Manhattan Project is a matter of some dispute. For the most part, the work was done by Americans (many of them jewish. but certainly not all) and, to a lesser extent, Britons.

* There are many indications that Stalin was planning a mass action against Jews shortly before his death. Probably this would have taken the form of a forced exile to some distant corner of the Soviet Union – that was his usual m.o. with other ethnic groups in disfavor. Of course many would have died in transit and due to bad conditions once they arrived.

While Jews were not targeted for collective punishment, plenty were caught up in the net of the purges. And of course Jewish religious and cultural life was destroyed – nothing that was not co-opted by the Communist Party could be allowed to exist.

Post Stalin and especially post-1967, traditional Russian anti-Semitism reasserted itself but this mostly took the form of discrimination in jobs, university admissions, etc. rather than large scale violence.

* There are available statistics of GULAG inmates for most years, and the proportion of Jews was at most half of their proportion in the general population throughout. They weren’t targeted in any of the ethnic operations in the 1930s or after the war, though it was rumored that Stalin planned a huge “anti-Zionist” operation and show trial before he died, but he actually killed only maybe 500 during the actual anti-Zionist operation and trials, which is nothing by Stalin’s standards. All the while their proportion among the higher echelons of the party and especially the repressive apparatus was much higher than their proportion among the general population until well into the late 1930s.

* The existence of closed cities in the Soviet Union is a matter of undeniable historical fact. There are thousands of other references beside wikipedia that would confirm this. A search of “soviet union closed cities” has over half a million hits. Read the first few hits if you doubt the wiki. No one (sane) denies that they existed, so I don’t know what your point is.

As I mentioned before, the US had something of an equivalent in Los Alamos during WWII. The Soviets just considered a lot more stuff to be top secret than we did. Instead of considering just their #1 top secret weapon development center to be ultra secret, they set up dozens and stayed permanently on a war footing thru the entire Cold War.

Feynman was not a big fan of the secrecy behind the Manhattan Project. He thought it actually impeded progress. He was sent on a field trip to Oak Ridge and he found out that the people designing the plant hadn’t (because of secrecy) been told what the characteristics of uranium were and what it would take to trigger a chain reaction. Because of this, he discovered that the plant had been designed in such a way that there would have been numerous dangerous criticality incidents if he hadn’t caught them. He lobbied to be allowed to explain a certain amount to them and then they were able to figure out on their own how to design the plant so it would not blow up.

Likewise, there was a group of bright high school graduates at Los Alamos assigned to run the IBM punch card tabulators that functioned as sort of crude computers. At first they were just given bunch of math problems to solve but not told what they meant and whether higher was better or lower was better or what. As a result they found the work incredibly boring. He got permission to give them some background on the meaning of the math problems and their productivity shot way up and they devise better faster ways to solve the problems on their own and considerably sped up the program.

Given this, you have to wonder how much of the Soviet obsession with secrecy was self defeating.

* As with Chinese and Jews, the thing is, both are correct. Tons of geniuses and tons of fakers. In fact, it’s totally consistent with the artless “ramping-up until the machine breaks,” applied by both Chinese and Jews to most processes, to just crank up the mill and accept more fakers as an externality of more geniuses.

* The other explanation is that by 1989 when more than half of Jews had higher education the percentage of Jews who could access it even based on pure meritocracy had been maxed out. Let’s crudely assume a mean IQ of 100 for Russians and 115 for Jews with an S.D. of 15. This means that 16% of Russians and 50% of Jews will have an IQ of 115 or above. Let’s say that this is the part of the population that had access to a higher education in the Soviet era (this makes sense: The system was, for the most part, meritocratic, and standards for entry where far higher than today when higher education is far more accessible). According to our stats, the actual higher education achievement figures in 1989 were 14% for Russians and 56% for Jews, i.e. Jewish access to education was actually higher than what you would get by assuming reasonable mean IQ’s and no anti-Semitic discrimination. Of course even slight differences in the actual mean IQ levels (e.g. a Russian mean IQ of 97, not 100 – as may be more realistic) will have substantial impacts but they would not cardinally change the overall picture.

* Dear old Germania, where have your clever ones gone? What have you done for us lately?

The University of Berlin’s proud list of Nobel Prize Laureates.
In the fields of chemistry, literature, medicine and physics:

Chemistry

Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1901

Emil Fischer
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1902

Adolf von Baeyer
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1905

Eduard Buchner
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1907

Richard Willstätter
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1915

Fritz Haber
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1918

Walther Nernst
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1920

Peter Debye
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1936

Adolf Butenandt
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1939

Otto Hahn
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1944

Otto Diels
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1950

Literature

Theodor Mommsen
Nobel Prize for Literature 1902

Medicine

Emil von Behring
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1901

Robert Koch
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1905

Paul Ehrlich
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1908

Albrecht Kossel
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1910

Otto Warburg
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1931

Hans Spemann
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1935

Werner Forßmann
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1956

Physics

Wilhelm Wien
Nobel Prize in Physics 1911

Max von Laue
Nobel Prize in Physics 1914

Max Planck
Nobel Prize in Physics 1918

Albert Einstein
Nobel Prize in Physics 1921

Gustav Hertz
Nobel Prize in Physics 1925

James Franck
Nobel Prize in Physics 1925

Werner Heisenberg
Nobel Prize in Physics 1932

Erwin Schrödinger
Nobel Prize in Physics 1933

Walter Bothe
Nobel Prize in Physics 1954

Max Born
Nobel Prize in Physics 1954

Don’t know how many of these great minds would have been purged by Nazi Aryanization. It’s probably wrong for me to focus on the brightest lights of all the millions of innocents who perished, but I can’t help thinking about how much of Europe’s human potential and extraordinary talent were lost to the catastrophes of the 20th century that were either murdered or scared into exile.

If all the aspiring political activists, revolutionary vanguards and SJW crusaders would just put down their megaphones and roll up their sleeves and humbly join us in the labs, we might actually change the world and beat cancer or develop practical fusion power… Perhaps we all can’t be geniuses, but you don’t need to be an Einstein to contribute to the team.

* [Jewish religious and cultural life was destroyed]

What a shame! It meant the Jews in Russia couldn’t replicate their extraordinary scientific achievements prior to 1860, when the Russian state didn’t interfere at all with their “religious and cultural life”.

* On the topic of Soviet Jews, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast was a rather intriguing endeavor. Stalin set up at Zionist state within the Soviet Union in the extreme Far East bordering China.

Things did not exactly work out. There is much to admire about the Russians, but when they screw up, they tend to do so in spectacular fashion. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast is today less than 1% Jewish. Interestingly, its official flag is the Rainbow Flag.

* Israel has more startup companies per capita and more scientific papers published per capita than any other country.

* Lots of great science is being done in Germany. Max Planck Institutes are a formidable network. On a whole, Germany’s most science metrics (citation impact per published paper, etc) are higher than in the USA. Two relatively recent immigrants from Germany won Nobels – Blobel in 1999 and Sudhof in 2013.