You could be writing about very large parts of the world today there, not just the USSR as it was.
And some of those parts would be closer to home than you may be comfortable with.
Yes but there was more equality than it is now in the west among the richest and the poor. Healthcare, education (all, even higher!), and apartments were provided by the state. Think how much you make vs how much you spend for you house ($500K / 30 years?). What about about your healthcare over you lifetime $5M? Or college education $100K? If you didn't have those expenses, you might get by with just $15K/yearsin some parts of the US. Yes all those things were of the lowest quality but they were _there_. The oppression and gulags were there too, I am not excusing them at all.
Then what are you saying? I'm finding it very hard to work out what your point is.
"The coercion of the state (such as it was) did not play a significant role in the final quality of these engineering works."
The point was that if food is cheap, and other stuff is provided, perhaps you don't have to pay your engineers $150K/year. If you can centralize all the education, housing and healthcare you can provide it cheaper for each person. Well of course , the system was broken and eventually fell appart.
But I was just highlighting that just because those particular engineers didn't make the equivalent dollar amount / year that US engineers made doesn't mean they had a proportionally lower standard of living, that is all.
No but you have to look at the entire value chain. In the old Soviet Empire (call a spade a spade) conditions were often very poor for miners, farmers, etc. If those people had been paid a market rate for the raw materials and labour, and so on, at every stage in the value chain, then the cash bill at the end would have been much, much higher.
I don't doubt Russian engineers were very talented - we all saw that Russia produced great mathematicians, chess players, etc. But not so good as they could work miracles.