User blog comment:20thCentFopp/Inside the Villainy of Genius: Iron Man and Anton Vanko/@comment-4652104-20131210081014

Brilliant.

The whole "kill Vanko, he's dangerous" concept would have made sense in Stalin's era. Although, nuclear physicists were actually spared. It's an interesting story:

The secret police were organising "science conferences" where the academic world was purged of scientists who opposed the party line (e.g. biologists who believed Darwin rather than Lysenko) or were otherwise suspicious. They were either executed or sent to the Gulag. But when the head of police called a certain leading physics professor and asked "Say, professor, I heared that quantum physics and relativity are non-materialistic..." The professor answered: "Sir, without them, there will be no bomb." The physics "conference" was cancelled.

They even managed to get Stalin to pull politically suspicious scientists from the Gulag, by claiming that they were necessary for nuclear research.

Back to the point: I think Stalin would have had Vanko killed within 15 minutes of the suit's first successful test flight. But Khrushchev was a different kind of person in a different era. Although brilliant scientists would be destroyed in various ways throughout the soviet block and era.

Similarly, it was no longer the McCarthy era in USA. So a some less ridiculous suspicions against Stark might be in order.

However, what I find most unlikely in this whole story is that Vanko would pilot the suit himself. Or allowed to fly it to USA.

One last thing: the so called scientists in this comic, are in fact engineers.