The Soviet Cloning Machine

Recently I saw this meme on twitter:

The genius who ripped this meme from Reddit also brought up Soviet cars as examples of originality, and that really annoyed me. For you see, one of the hallmarks of the Soviet socialism was flagrant disregard for intellectual property. To this day people of my generation are constantly surprised when they discover what exactly was copied and from what.

Here’s a exhaustive list of very iconic Soviet things and their capitalist counterparts.

Volga Gaz and Ford Customline
Lada and Fiat
Zaporozhets and Fiat 600

Concorde and Tu-144 aka Conkordsky
AK 47 and Sturmgewehr 44

“Iron Felix” and the Odhner calculator
Soviet clone of Parker 51 and Parker 51 fountain pen
Buran/Energiya and the Space Shuttle (not to scale)
Casio and Elektronica
Hasselblad and Kiev 88
Milton Bradley Big Trak / Elektronika Lunokhod

Municipal Building in NYC and one of the “7 Sisters” buildings in Moscow

I’d actually like to build a more exhaustive list of these, but for now this will do.