Beria really was in charge of the early Soviet nuclear weapons program, and, while everyone was terrified of him, he was apparently good at managing the program.
The classic joke about that, and it may not have been a joke, is that after the first bomb worked, the people who would have been shot if it failed got the Hero of the Soviet Union award. The ones that would have been sent to a labor camp got some lesser award.
The Soviet nuclear weapons programme was completely terrifying, their early reactors were open-cycle which meant the water cooling them was contaminated and simply dumped eventually leading to this lovely tourist spot where an hour on the shores of the lake would be a certain death sentence:
If Beria was a good manager, they wouldn't have to threaten to shoot people. Or, another approach is that managers who threaten their employees' lives are awful at their jobs.
In the free world, managers don't threaten that and they achieve far more. Even in the military, whatever the law, even in wartime it's never done afaik.
Chertok in his books - https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/rockets_people_vol1_deta... , but the episod is, I think, from volume IV - tells the following story. Soviet space designers are in the beginning of the work on the manned Moon expedition. Korolev and Glushko - two towering figures, the best rocket constructor and best engine constructor of the country - can't find common ground, at all, and have completely deteriorated relationships (mildly speaking). The disagreement is about rocket engines. Discussing this, one rocket scientist (Chertok or Bushuyev) says that if Father of Nation - Stalin - was alive, he'd invited everybody involved, set the deadline, asked how to help - and USSR had engines no worse than in USA. "Great people", wrote Chertok, "aren't saints, and like to show off. If the fear is added and also everything which is needed for design bureaus and manufacturers, they can produce miracles. This Stalin understood and used in full." Regarding Beria, a story said, that Beria invites two disagreeing managers to talk and says, "if two communists can't find an agreement, then one of them is enemy. I don't have time to find out who's who. I give you 24 hours, find the common ground", and it worked.
It's probably very hard to realize what it was to live in those times - especially at the visible positions.
An anecdote retold from a book is not meaningful, even if true. And if Beria couldn't accomplish that without threatening their lives, it's again a massive failure on Beria's part.
In addition, any bad manager can scream at and threaten people about some individual issue, but there is a lot of evidence that it's very counterproductive overall. What people learn to do is to avoid the danger, not to get anything done - including taking no initiative or responsibility, or even accomplishing something that might attract attention.
Nobody models themselves on Soviet management; it's almost the epitome of bad management, the picture in the dictionary. The Soviet space program performed poorly compared with the US.
> The Soviet space program performed poorly compared with the US.
Soviet Moon program was a competitive endeavor - Korolev used Kuznetsov's engines, Chelomey was cooperating with Glushko, Yangel used one of the most modern space factories in USSR and proposed his own plans. And they all were supported.
Contrary to this, in USA NASA was playing strict Gosplan. Parts were doled out to different manufacturers, and the state was controlling everything and writing checks.
No wonder USSR lost :) . Market approach couldn't compete with centralized planning.
> Parts were doled out to different manufacturers, and the state was controlling everything and writing checks.
> No wonder USSR lost :) . Market approach couldn't compete with centralized planning.
What a bizarre depiction on many levels. It's like Soviet revisionist history.
No matter what your analysis, the Soviet space program after very early days has not been competitive with the US, nor were the Soviets competitive in almost any other technology, economically, socially, politically, etc etc.
> Too many deadlocks in modern world which could be resolved a la Solomon.
Let's take a step back and think how bizarre the common reactionary appeal to cruelty is anywhere outside its political context. We want more cruelty! Is that a goal? Why are we posting fantasies about how great cruelty would be? On top of that, it's completely baseless.
The hard antithesis of "fail fast and early so you learn something". The problem with this technique is what to do once you've shot the first group of experts.
" he was apparently good at managing the program."
That's one thing a lot of people don't understand. A lot of these monsters aren't just monsters but they are also very capable. Beria was a good manager, so was Himmler who led the Nazi SS. Stalin also was a hard worker and a master bureaucrat.
The same goes for today's leaders of organised crime, you have be CEO-material in order to manage 'Ndrangheta's ~50 billion euros business [1], it's not enough just to be able to kill some guys on a dark street in Catanzaro anymore.
Here is a insightful blog post from Erik Bernhardsson on Business secrets from terrible people[1] where he writes about management lessons from the Taliban, Theranos, Al-Qaeda and The Black Kings a crack-dealing gang in Chicago.
And here is an interesting article from the Economist on management lessons from Mexico’s drug lords[2]
They built and ran billion dollar international organizations that employed thousands of people and managed to not get killed or arrested for a long time. That's not an east thing to do in my book
You are underestimating how effective a "management" technique is demonstrating that you can shoot underperforming minions.
A lot of that "management" was simply terrorizing people to do your bidding.
So, no, he most likely wasn't a good manager the same way a bank robber isn't showing "good interpersonal skills" because he was able to convince all patrons to sit by the wall and employees to open the vault.
This is true, but only partly. Say, copious killings did not help the Big Jump in China, or the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, to achieve any impressive breakthroughs.
You are underestimating how effective a "management" technique is demonstrating that you can shoot underperforming minions.
I am somewhat skeptical of this take. I think if heaping abuse and threats of worse on people worked magic, there would be no homeless people in the US.
Threats only work if the capacity is there -- or almost there -- and it's feasible to extract X with sufficient pressure. But you still can't get blood from a turnip.
The threat must be legible and have a credible threat of authoritative judgment so steps can be taken to predictably avoid the consequence. It's not at all clear to a homeless person what steps they should take to reduce suffering in their life. (I'm aware I'm replying to a homeless or formerly homeless person. And it needn't be said, but I'm not saying that an effective threat is moral.)
Or the steps to reduce suffering are clear to them. You just don't like the conclusion they drew and don't approve.
There is insufficient affordable housing in the US. We build apartments designed for a nuclear family and expect young single people to get roommates and split the rent and then you see questions on the internet about "How do I deal with this roommate from hell?" and we make horror movies about it like Single White Female and continue to not offer housing options suitable for living alone on a budget.
Since WW2, we've torn down about a million SROs. We now think of SROs as housing for homeless people when it used to be normal market rate housing for single people.
Some people are homeless because they left abusive situations. They decided "I would rather sleep outside than continue to put up with this."
But the narrative most people accept is that homeless people are all addicts and crazies and this somehow means it's a personal problem, they aren't trying hard enough, they would rather be high than in shelter.
Addiction is a hard problem to solve no matter your social class. We don't act like "Wealthy rock stars with a drug habit must be wealthy because they take so many drugs." but we conclude that there is a cause and effect relationship between drug use and homelessness.
It's basically prejudice talking.
People on the street tend to be square pegs who have trouble finding a slot that fits them. We've actively eliminated a lot of those oddly shaped slots and then act like "You just don't want to make your life work."
Homeless people aren't necessarily any more or less virtuous or hard working or whatever than anyone else. The fabric of their life came unraveled and they don't know how to readily weave it back together and then the world tells them "The beatings shall continue until morale improves."
Yes, I agree with all that. Not sure where your second sentence is coming from. I was only responding to the idea that there is only one kind of way to threaten someone, that is ineffective.
If police starting executing 10 random homeless people every night, it wouldn't necessarily "solve" homelessness but the homeless would get very creative, very quickly to figure out how to not be where-ever the police were looking.
As with any management technique, it's about making sure you're focusing people on the right efforts, for values of "right" in terms of getting what you want. A horrifying police state has many examples both more and less efficient than Stalin and Beria, particularly if you take a view of the modern world through the lens of competitive authoritarianism.
Was it purely luck that they happened to pick good candidates to run specific programs whereas say, Mao did not? Could be, but to pick another example, I'd wager that few people would argue against the notion that Fidel Castro did more, with less resources, and less terror, than Stalin in relative terms.
But back to the homeless situation in the US, it's more than major political groups have no interest in solving the problem and that creeps into institutional policy in insidious ways, as opposed to whether or not harsh methods might have any positive results (ignoring the whole awfulness part). Malignant neglect is perhaps worse than active malice.
If police starting executing 10 random homeless people every night, it wouldn't necessarily "solve" homelessness...
That would rapidly cut back on the obviously, highly homeless population. Over the course of a year, that would be 3650 fewer homeless in the area.
When I was homeless in San Diego, there was an estimated 10k homeless on the streets of that city. Such a policy would tentatively eliminate the population of street homeless in just three years.
(Couch surfing is another form of homelessness but it is less obvious than people out in the street. Also some homeless float from cheap hotel to cheap hotel, being bled for more money each month than rent would cost but unable to arrange permanent housing.)
In the meantime, lines at homeless services would get shorter. This would leave more resources to go around for the remaining homeless, making it easier for them to solve their problems.
It would be draconian and have other effects, like normalizing the idea that police can play Judge Dredd and be judge, jury and executioner -- at least if you commit the crime of being very poor. Personally I would rather see us resolve the dire shortage of affordable housing that is a known root cause of homelessness in the US.
My point being: If that policy were instituted and the homeless suddenly began getting their act together, it wouldn't be solely due to people being "more motivated" by fear. It would in part be because of reduced burden on limited resources for solving the problem in question.
It might also be because fear of execution would free people up to try things that are currently "unthinkable." It would cut through their own internal red tape concerning "acceptable" behavior and likely also have other people looking the other way because "Well, hell, I would do that too in order to avoid being executed for the crime of being poor."
It might also make people decide they strongly disapprove of this outcome and make them more likely to donate to homeless services or volunteer, thereby adding more resources to the system to solve the problem.
Having written the above, it makes me wonder if these monsters were effective in part because they were operating in a low resource environment and reducing the burden on the available resources helped the remaining people be better fed and more effective and/or helped people decide they didn't care about looking foolish or breaking some social taboo. They cared about not being shot.
Of course, it's politically incorrect to analyze it and then say that's what happened and thereby "justify" their abhorrent actions. So people say they were monsters and say that we just don't understand why anyone put up with them.
Ideally, in a humane environment, we find ways to think outside the box without having to shoot people to make that socially acceptable.
It's pretty senseless too. The monsters were ineffective at everything but maintaining their own power. The Soviet Union was an economic, social, and political disaster that collapsed. It's a bizarre example to look to, like basing your agriculture on Soviet farming practices.
It's so trendy to embrace hate and cruelty as if it's just unavoidable realism, but it's really just reactionary rhetoric designed to undermine everyone to the left of the far right (i.e., anyone with any compassion or decency). We need to stop playing games with hatred and stand up for - and 'analyze' - something better, something positive that will get done something good.
> Ideally, in a humane environment, we find ways to think outside the box without having to shoot people to make that socially acceptable.
Nope. Daniel Ortega and Nicolas Maduro, in their countries in Latin America, today, can put any one in prison within hours for no reason besides a capture order. And they can do it in bulk. They can kill, but they don't need to. Not high profile victims, at least.
Their countries are and will remain poor because they are idiots beyond what is necessary to stay in power. They aren't good administrators.
I would also say not to underestimate the effort required to be in the position where you are making the threats rather than on the receiving end. A rise to that position also includes effectively managing your rivals into oblivion.
I am willing to agree. That is one of the reasons I sometimes feel people do not treat Putin seriously enough. The guy rose through ranks of US equivalent of CIA. You do not get there purely by luck. You do need skills including management.
I would rate Putin as extremely intelligent. What he has achieved is pretty impressive and he has held his position for a very long time. . You don’t have to like him but you have to accept that he is very good at what he does.
Is he though? Yeah he is definitely intelligent and surely ruthless. However: there is a reason he’s still in power. There is no one, in the world, to be able to guarantee his and his family’s safety once he leaves power. At the moment he’s all-powerful, but wouldn’t you rather have the option to retire?
> You are underestimating how effective a "management" technique is demonstrating that you can shoot underperforming minions.
> A lot of that "management" was simply terrorizing people to do your bidding.
As others are pointing out, but spelled differently: there's a difference between having people do what you want, and becoming successful. Many CEOs are able to get the workers do whatever, and the company will fail exactly because of that. It takes skill and knowledge to know where to lead.
No, this is demonstrably false by contrasting this with all the many (most?) totalitarian "managers" who had the same abilities to terrorize people but were rather ineffective despite that. There can be an obvious difference between the personal abilities of two people in a similar role, even if that role is evil.
I couldn't find any hard research on this but the sentiment seems to be that stack ranking at Microsoft was part of their stagnation before their revitalisation by the new CEO
> You are underestimating how effective a "management" technique is demonstrating that you can shoot underperforming minions.
It's not a great regular management technique, but its a great image management technique in the narrow sense that it effectively leverages survivorship bias (for both individuals and records) to favor the future positive perception of your management technique.
Developing and motivating people is just 1 aspect of a manager’s role, there are many other hats like project manager, vision, drive incentivising
Arguably not many managers have it
I have no idea if those people were great manager or great despots there maybe a relation with how hard working they were
The smart and competent know this, and put on a persona, like Bush II's drawl or Boris Johnson, who intentionally ruffles his hair - as that is the image he wants to project.
That's what the Germans thought until the Nazis started working the system. I bet if Trump had been a little smarter, sometimes kept his mouth shut and not kicked people around all the time, he may have got away with much more.
That’s what I am thinking. It doesn’t even have to be MAGA only. I bet wokeness could also turn into a dictatorship with the right leader. That’s why rohe current US political climate where people think that the other side is evil and can’t be negotiated with is so dangerous. The right leader can make a case that there is a dangerous crisis and that laws have to be suspended to deal with the threat and voila you have a dictatorship that’s supported by half the population.
That's why I'm pre-committing against the death penalty. Even murderers shouldn't be killed by the state. [1] I invite anyone on the right to join me in this stance - It puts a cap on how bad the consequences for our political positions can get.
[1] There's a bunch of edge cases for self-defense and how to apprehend people. I don't have the time to get into these. Most people know what I mean by "Abolish the death penalty".
Please let's not "both sides" this. It's the maga crowd who have fallen into a cult of personality and are excusing those personalities for their incompetence and its results. Until that appears from another vector it is dishonest and misleading to project this on any other group.
That is routine for US politics; partisans always forgive their team for incompetence and its results. I think only catastrophes as egregious as Afghanistan (all the way through from Bush to Biden) have managed to pierce the partisan distortion field.
> I bet wokeness could also turn into a dictatorship with the right leader.
What is that based on? The progressive left heavily supports the democratic process, they don't try to prevent anyone from voting, they haven't elected anyone who advocates that. They also control no state or national executive positions and no legislatures, while the GOP recently controlled the White House, regularly controls both houses of Congress, and controls many governorships and state legislatures - and openly use that power to prevent people from voting them out. In many states, the voters cannot choose who runs their legislatures.
Not much more than what is currently sanctioned by all the people who work in the government and aren't elected. You don't have to be maga to destroy a country, just the kind of small minded person who would think that it is possible to do so, and so out of fear of being called names, and the local Karen giving you the dirty eye at the hoa meetings, you would lie down and let the self ascribed "adults" take care of "it" for you, instead of thinking for yourself and questioning authority. ;)
Beria's daughter in law mused to Simon Sebag Montefiore, a recent Stalin biographer, in an interview that "Beria was the kind of man who, if he lived in the United States, might very well have become chairman of General Motors."
There is a really interesting take on Beria in what is possibly the best Stalin's biography ("Court of the Red Tzar"). Apparently, Beria saw himself a successor to Stalin who would put the country onto a milder course, and he was looking forward to redeeming himself in the face of history. There was something to the effect of him saying that his children would get educated at Oxford. And he did not mean it how current Russian elites do it (so that their seed can escape the country they have been destroying), but rather to highlight his appreciation for Western values / education / culture and willingness to learn from the recent WW2 allies and adapt their methods on USSR territory. The whole idea of "my children will study at Oxford" coming from someone like Beria was shocking.
Beria was by all means a horrible person. But Khruschev (or anybody else really that high up the Soviet totem pole) was as much of an executioner and a murderer. It's just that Khruschev has won and he got to make Beria a (justified) boogeyman. Now we know of Khruschev as just an inefficient manager who took off his shoe at UN and not as a person who called arresting 308 people a poor performance for 1936 Moscow or a person who orchestrated bloody repressions in Ukraine.
At the same time, although Beria's activities were pure terror during Stalin's rule, chances are, if Beria did come to power, he'd have been a better ruler than Kruschev from the humanistic perspective (less people would have been murdered and sent to camps, less errors made etc.). But that's a lot of "ifs".
It does sound wild (to me as well), but then there is evidence of USSR
party elites (e.g. Kaganovich) turning from maniacs and terrorists into peaceful bureaucrats overnight upon Stalin's death.
Beria's claims or promises are meaningless; that's a completely untrustworthy source. Beria was a homicidal maniac telling you that, if you give them power, they'll be 'milder'.
Lots of homicidal maniacs, and even plain old dictators, say the same. The next step, after they gain power, is to say that there is a new period of openness, and their critics are encouraged to speak out. This releases some pressure while the dictator consolidates control over the levers of power - it's not rule of law, so unlike an elected President, the levers don't just shift to the new person. And of course it helps that their critics identify themselves. You should know what happens next. (A popular early step is that enemies are arrested for 'corruption'.)
The nuance there is that Beria made those claims in private and did not want that to be known. At that moment he would score more political points presenting himself as a hardliner. It was something the author of that book found out almost by accident doing the research about his private life.
If not for the excellent quality of the other material in that book I would have not really paid much attention to what Beria had to say about his plans
> It does sound wild (to me as well), but then there is evidence of USSR party elites (e.g. Kaganovich) turning from maniacs and terrorists into peaceful bureaucrats overnight upon Stalin's death.
They were "murderous bureaucrats" for whom mass murder was a faceless statistics. They would not fret or get emotional about it neither before nor after the fact.
A glimpse of artistic rendition of how plain and "bureaucratic" a mass murder machine could be is a historic re-enactment movie "Conspiracy" [0] about Wannsee conference of 1942 (it is about Nazi Germany not USSR but the theme of "murderous bureaucracy" seems to be universal).
“It does sound wild (to me as well), but then there is evidence of USSR party elites (e.g. Kaganovich) turning from maniacs and terrorists into peaceful bureaucrats overnight upon Stalin's death.”
Same happened in Germany. Nazis turned practically overnight into exemplary democrats.
I was born in the USSR and speak Russian. I generally get Russian humor and some Russian jokes are quite funny. However I share the author’s opinion here: finding the humor in these jokes is rough. I watched the first video where the jokes are being told and honestly event the funniest of these are barely funny. You have to really place yourself into the situation where these people are considered larger than life and treated with all manner of deference and respect. To see them doing things like cursing like a trucker, to realize that they are fallible in some way, etc. can be made humorous but a lot of these jokes seem to fall under the category of “you had to have been there”.
I am French. This is the exact problem I have with some movies my Polish friends told me to watch.
They were from the 70-80's and were making fun of the situation at that time (how to game the communists, the system, or the absurdity of said system).
I did not find them funny at all because I did not have the context. To me they were depressing.
I wonder how contemporary young Polish people see them today (when they watch them at all).
Czech here. Lived through last ten years of Communism. These films were repeated ad nauseam like a propaganda assuring us that the system is great because we can game it. Hated it then, hate it now.
Romanian here, mostly the same age as yours, humour greatly helped us during the last years of Ceausescu's regime, when things were becoming really rough (power cuts in the middle of winter, food rationing etc.). I'll leave one of the (dark) jokes in here just for the sake of history:
> There's a funeral procession on the street just outside Bulă's house (Bulă was the eponymous hero of almost all our jokes back then) and Bulă and his mother could hear the grieving lady crying from outside:
> "Where do you go, my beloved husband? Why do you have to go where it's eternally dark and cold?"
> Bulă, to his mother: "Mom, quick, lock the doors! They're bringing that guy over here to stay with us!"
It still cracks me up to this day thinking about that joke, even though the cold (especially the cold) was a very difficult thing to negotiate as a kid.
We also used to have jokes with a Russian scientist, an American scientist and a Romanian (didn't really matter if he was a scientist or not), in the end the Romanian was always getting the better of the other two (that sort of joke is alluded to in the text, with the Russian scientist doing something bad to a snake in Los Alamos).
These jokes are often not funny to non Eastern Europeans, but jokes from one ex-communist are often easy to understand in other ones.
The Martyr Made podcast guy also remarks that when he tells people a Polish joke he heard, Westerners are completely unamused while Easterners do find it funny.
Russian too, yep thats not funny, but you should know one of the most must-do things for US (gov payed) historian today - eventually write story about freaky-bloody Stalin, Gulag and Beria who eats children. For the sake of Freedom and Wellfare of course. Don't forget that von Neumann was truly genious at least because he wanted to wipe that Hell from the Earth (Yep they never told you that)
Somewhat expressive and subjective comment, though not worse than the style of linked piece of mind.
But they did for the most part eat children, which is often confirmed by their own investigations of each other, there's the one for Beria where he coerced dozens of women to have sex with him, including many minors.
It's questionable how much that really was von Neumann's actual opinion. It was stated during the peak of McCarthyism, and he had a lot of personal contacts with people who had been impacted by it.
Always very vocally being the most anti-communist person in the room might have been just a defensive strategy.
IDK about Hungary, but Czechoslovakia executed almost 200 people for political crimes within a relatively short timespan of true Stalinism (1948-1953). Hundreds more were shot at the border trying to escape, or killed in concentration camps mining and processing uranium ore without any protective gear etc. Thousands survived the camps with health undermined.
Many of those were members of the intelligentsia. An average escapee with an academic title was likely to know at least a few victims by name.
It wasn't hard to hate the perpetrators genuinely.
Jokes about nuclear power in the hands of authoritarian despotism are quite disturbing. I don't know how to compare the insanity of the past (over there) with the insanity of the present (over here).
And as I write this in Los Alamos, the humor feels very much like whistling [happy tunes] while walking past the [deeply creepy] graveyard...
That said, I did actually laugh out loud at one of the jokes. I'm not sure if the humor I found in it is the intent of the original Russian gag, but maybe I can re-frame the story to reflect my time served in Silicon Valley and tech indistry elsewhere:
"""
The engineering team lead at the new, secret facility came into the Major's office one morning, carrying a cheerful poster that read:
Keep in mind these important lines:
Working hard shortens your time!
"What's the meaning of this?!" the team leader cried. "Are the deadlines being cut again?"
The Major was quick to reassure his civilian counterpart: "Nothing to worry about, Jim! That's been put out for the prison labor group that's coming in this week!"
Much relieved, the engineer returned to his cubicle, where he drafted a memo to his team to pass along the encouraging news.
> a reminder that we are having some laughs in the service of the building of weapons of mass destruction and there’s something inherently problematic about that
I don't get it. The problem is with building weapons of mass destruction in the first place, not doing it and then finding humor in the situation.
Isn't it quite funny that a so-called "intelligent" species would expend so much energy, money and time to build a series of devices to annihilate itself? Surely it's at least a bit ironic?
Dr Strangelove is a comedy about exactly that, and its humor works. It seems when Kubrick started to work on that project he wanted to do a "serious" movie, but the more he learned about the whole system the more he found it utterly absurd, and he came to the conclusion that the only way to talk about it was to make a satire.
I think that when you are actively participating in the building of the weapons, being like "lol isn't it funny that we are helping to make hell on earth possible in a heartbeat?" is a bit questionable.
Last I checked Kubrick wasn't working on the bombs himself.
when my history teacher told me that there was a verdict "ten years' shooting", I thought he was kidding. Apparently he was not. It means 10 years in gulag and then a bullet to the head, provided you survive that ordeal. Paroles, hah!
I ask people who say they don't belive in hell whether they have heard and understand the Russian sense of humor, as when you do, there's no other place it could have come from. na zdarovye my friends!
Joking about the annhialiation of cities of people, and potentially the species, is dark - but to call it merely "problematic" as though there were some solution to said problem instead of recognizing the existential horror it represented through humor, seems like an ambitious use of the word. There are some things only the involuntary reaction of humor can express.
Life in the west can be much more horrible for a lot of people than life in USSR was for most but dark humor is very mild and looked down upon. I would say cultural differences play much bigger role.
Whose life is worse in the west? Homeless, outlaws (drug addicts, prostitutes), arrested illegal immigrants, some aboriginal communities.
I am wrong about that? I lived in a communist country as a child and young adult. Life in the west can be better...or much worse.
The USSR had homeless, drug addicts, prostitutes and marginalised communities too. It had all the same problems, plus a whole lot more. Admittedly, there were a lot fewer people outside trying to get in though. I'll give you that.
I did not live in USSR so I can't say how many of each they had but the country I lived in also had all of those and I can say there was and order of magnitude less of them than what you see now in the equivalently sized (population wise) west country.
You are also correct that many of us wanted to live like the TV stars we saw lived in the western TV shows and not many people wanted to cross to the east.
But if you think that life in the east was all horror all the time or most of the time or event 1/1000 of the time then you have been brainwashed even more than what we were.
No one wants to go back to the political system of USSR but imagining that life for most people was horrible is just naive. Not understanding the circumstances and motivations of your opponents is a mistake that will cost us all dearly.
The Americans were going to use the atom bomb for nuclear blackmail against the Soviets. The US was utterly convinced that they had at least 10 years monopoly on nuclear weapons. They even stopped sharing atomic secrets with the UK.
I discovered a long time ago that Russian jokes aren't funny for us westerners. My then Russian girlfriend told me a joke and I didn't laugh (I'm sure the translation was top notch she spoke French very well). She then proceeded to tell the joke in Russian to her mother that laughed so much that she had tears in her eyes.
Richard Rhodes’s _Dark Sun_ covers the Soviet atomic bomb program. Beria would share secrets only with Khurchatov, and it seemed that the benefit was confirmation and avoiding dead-ends.
>> c) a reminder that we are having some laughs in the service of the building of weapons of mass destruction and there’s something inherently problematic about that.
Is it problematic though? To occasionally laugh at the absurdity of it all. All of what we have gotten ourselves into as a species?
It was hilarious, but not very accurate. I don't expect accuracy from a film like that, but it's good to keep in mind. Beria was even worse than they depicted. He was a sadistic serial killer and sexual predator.
I don't think the film hid the sadistic side of Beria or his being a sexual predator. But maybe it was not so clear cut to all viewers as it was also a dark comedy with true gallows humor.
Armando Iannucci claimed that some of the things they showed in that film were changed to make them more believable because the real events were just too far outside of what would be credible to an audience.
I would have written 'For black humour about the Soviet-era', because «Soviet-era black humor» suggests that the humour is that of the Soviet-era. It is surely British, extremely Armando Iannucci (of course), with French sources - and I am not sure the humour has a "Russian spirit".
It is intentionally a strong rewriting of history - in no way a documentary but for many historic details that fit with the intended narrative for being preposterously "humorous" (if you wish, read "shocking").
An unmissable masterpiece, an Armando Iannucci insight about humans and politics - or "the human condition", and consequently "the nature of humour". Facts are sacrificed to this intent, which has priority.
It sort of reinforced the stereo types of how Stalin and his circle behaved. Stalin had psychopath traits, but what's shown in the film isn't remotely anything like how things may have happened.
I highly recommend Stephen Kotkin's new 3-volume biography of Stalin.
> Some of the stories are more in the line of “hooray for Soviet scientists” genre, which I find a lot less interesting
I find this very telling about the reviewer. When the Russians (or Soviets) show gallows humor, or are simply bizarre or we (in the West) want to read dark undertones in what they wrote: hell yes, it's just like I thought, the Soviet Union must have been a constant nightmare!
When they write in a self congratulatory tone, or simply praise their scientists: boring, let's skip that.
It is a way to self-select a vision of what the Soviet era must have been: all depressing, all zany, all the time.
The normal, they-were-humans-like-us bits get ignored because they are boring, confirming and reinforcing our preexisting ideas.
If you ever need a dose of reality, go see (google) some of Nikolai Getman's paintings of the life of prisoners in the Gulag which he had to paint in secret after being imprisoned for 8 years.
Thanks for the recommendation, I googled the paintings and they are both impressive and depressing.
However, I'm not sure I understand the relation to my comment. Do you think I was claiming life in the Gulag wasn't oppressive? Let me clarify: I was pointing out what I think is a curious bias in the author of the article.
As a kid I don't remember that much, but I do remember a Stalin joke, which something like this:
A film crew is making a film about the benevolence of Stalin. A little child walks up to the leader and asks for a sweet. Stalin says fuck off and the crew is immediately filming 'He could have killed her.' card.
That said, I agree with your overall point. We all see, what we want to see. The few that don't are either children or those who train themselves to actually look.
I don't think it's expected or unenlightening. Scientists are scientists; we want to cheer at their wins. Feynman was pretty much self-congratulatory in "Surely you're joking" -- sometimes annoyingly so -- yet we celebrate his anecdotes, we don't skip them.
Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. They're tedious, predictable (just look at the predictable responses below) and usually turn nasty.
I did not. I provided some perspective. The idea that the Soviet gulags were evil, without the larger context of evil perpetrated by various nation-states (particularly nuclear superpowers) distracts from the truth.
The fact that people react negatively to this factual consideration of evil in the context of nation-state politics is not my fault. I did not "take them on a flamewar tangent". And shying away from talking about truths like this only benefits the ignorant, at the expense of the rest of society.
A community that rejects critical thinking, or even engaging at all about complex and difficult subjects, is not a community worth protecting. I think these little "talks" are just training your community to reject difficult conversations rather than learning how to have them.
Sorry, but "what global superpower hasn't" counts as shallow flamebait on this site, and certainly a flamewar tangent. Just look at the responses you provoked. We don't want that here, and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again.
The prisoner situation does seem somewhat dire, but whenever I read the Soviet Union imprisoned huge numbers of people I have to laugh when I recall American statistics and the horrific conditions in our prisons where we also use slave labor (the 13th Amendment's lone exception). One day not too far in the future people will read about us in the same hushed undertones. Or perhaps not, because my hope is the press of the future is able to improve and grapple with difficult subjects instead of parroting McCarthite dogma.
For what it's worth Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman was one of my favorite books growing up. It was kind of a shock when Wellerstein drew attention how the humor compared to what they were doing. He's right, it is kind of grim.
I think you missed the point of my comment. The Soviet Union is not alone in committing atrocity or "evil". Every developed nation is guilty of it. And the scale of atrocity shouldn't be measured by the body count alone.
So a country that commit “evil” and claimed one innocent life should be lumped together with one that claimed 5 million innocent lives?
If your argument is there is no country who hasn’t committed evil in some form I’m not sure you’ll get much opposition or really be saying something people don’t already know.
If your excusing mass genocide because “everyone does bad stuff” then I’ll have to disagree.
You don't have to excuse immoral behavior to have a complex understanding of it.
Some would argue that hundreds of years of enslavement and death of millions of people is far, far worse than simply killing them. Which would put the United States pretty much at the top of the heap of evil nations. But we don't really think of the US as the most evil nation in the world, do we? Simultaneously, we don't seem to do anything to make up for that evil, even though the US has forced other nations to do so.
I bring all this up because it's extremely easy to point the finger at one group and generalizing it all as evil, when you're not part of that group. That's how humans perpetuate evil, as the book mentions. Just simplify them down to some external "thing" and justify or rationalize. Without acknowledging the context, and providing some form of comparison to others, it's easy to fall into the trap of demonization and over-simplification.
Beria was obviously an evil, sick, twisted fuck. But it's very hard to apply that generalization to a whole government or people.
The classic joke about that, and it may not have been a joke, is that after the first bomb worked, the people who would have been shot if it failed got the Hero of the Soviet Union award. The ones that would have been sent to a labor camp got some lesser award.