No Limit To Soviet Claims: Even Beer Best

Greymouth Evening Star, 22 September 1949, Page 6

No Limit To Soviet Claims: Even Beer Best

When you switch on the electric light, go to the movies, or send a telegram, do you give thanks to the Russians? You should, for according to the current campaign in the Soviet press all these things and most other modern inventions as well owe their discovery to Russian pioneers, states Gordon Young, writing in the Daily Mail, London.

The steam engine was not invented by James Watt but by Ivan Pulsonov, and that story about Watt watching a tea kettle is just another Capitalist lie. The electric light bulb was not the discovery of Edison but was devised by the. Russian scientist Ladygin in 1873, six years before Edison came out with it. Marconi And The Radio

Don’t think that Marconi produced the radio in 1986; it had already been done by the physicist Alexander Popov in 1895. And you “Western Imperialists” who praise Professor Alexander Fleming for-pioneering penicillin are forgetting that the original work in that field was done by an allRussian trio named Polofebnov, Manasjin, and Tukovsky. These are just a few of the statements made this year’by the Russian Press, Moscow Radio, and the Soviet Tass News Agency in accordance with the Kremlin’s dtive to convince the world—especially the Russian people —that Russia is not now, and has never been a country which lags behind the West. ’ The Kremlin learned from the lasi war that the thing which can rally and unite the Russian people in times of stress' is not Marxist ideology but good old Roman nationalism. So you have the paradox of Communists in all other lands being urged to be internationally minded, and Communists of the Soviet Union being intensively taught that it is today, as it has always been, Russia über alles. The new theme song of the Kremlin to it's 193,000,000 subjects is “You’re the Tops”—and the claims cover pretty well every field of life,, from diesel engines to bicycles (the first of which, they say, was built in 1801 by a Russian worker named Artomov, who cycled from the Urals to Moscow on it). The real pioneer work on splitting the .atom was done, according to the review Bolshevik, by the Russian physicists, Florov and Petryak. The. telephone, says the Moscow Academy of Science, was not discovered by Alexander Graham Bell but by Pavel Sjiling in 1830. The father of television was the physicist, Boris Rosing, who, says Tass, built the first apparatus.in 1911 “10 or 15 years before the American and British scientists.” . . , . , On Moscow Radio Vice-Admiral - Nikolai Kulakov has related that it was Russia which built the first armoured warship as well as the first submarine. Deliberately Stolen Some of Russia’s best inventions were, of course, deliberately stolen by the wicked West. Recently Tass has related how the German manufacturer, E. Werner Siemens, filched the credit for the inventions of the telegraph from the Russian scientist, Boris Jakobi, who, in 1845, built the first two telegraphic instruments. While on a journey abroad, says Tass, Jakobi showed his drawings to a trusted friend. Siemens came into the room while the drawings were lying on a table and took quick notes of them. The parachute was stolen by the French, according to Red Fleet. For the first parachute was devised by G. Kotelnikov in 1910, after he had seen an airman killed in a crash. But his idea was copied and developed by a French firm. It was Russian explorers, of course, who opened up the world. The first voyages to India were made, says the Literary Gazette not by Vasco da Gama but by Atanazy Nikitin. Exploration Of World The Commander-in-Chief of the Red Fleet (Admiral Jumasjev) has told on Moscow Radio how “one third of the world, from Alaska to Australia, was discovered by Russian explorers.” The head of Moscow’s Geological Institute declares that the Antarctic was pioneered by Russians in 1820, and that “the observations, later made by the Englishman Scott were false in many respects.” The list goes on indefinitely. It was Russian, not Western, ingenuity which pioneered the aeroplane (the inventor was Mojaski, 1882), the jet-plant (scientist Ziolkovsky), the talking film (perfected 1925), the motor-cycle and synthetic rubber. All these and many other items will be included in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. It is to be “the world’s best encyclopaedia,” and its aim is to show “the overwhelming superiority of Soviet thought over, the rotten culture of the Capitalist world.” P.S.: Even Russian Beer is Best. Tass says: “Leningrad beer is twice as strong as any foreign brew.”