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Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria
- jonstewart 5y agoRichard 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.
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoThe 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.
- Animats 5y agoBeria 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.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago" 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.
- Animats 5y agoA lot of these monsters aren't just monsters but they are also very capable. Scary thought for today: what happens when MAGA world finds someone with not just charisma, but competence and energy?
- RealityVoid 5y agoI'm not even from the US but that possibility is horrifying to me.
- ldehaan 5y agoNot 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. ;)
- ldehaan 5y agoThis reads better with /n's
- redis_mlc 5y ago> what happens when MAGA world finds someone with not just charisma, but competence and energy? Trump was the most effective on policy since Roosevelt. Unlike the stiff that's in office today.
- dzonga 5y agolike a tom cotton ? most people don't realize how close that reality is to come to fruition.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoThat’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.
- narrator 5y agoBeria'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."
- lmilcin 5y agoYou 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.
- PeterisP 5y agoNo, 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.
- lazypenguin 5y agoI 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.
- lmilcin 5y agoOf course. I assume it was honest, full time job. And a lot of overtime, possibly. He had to be good at something to get so far. I am just arguing that it is difficult to call it "management".
- dragonwriter 5y ago> 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 That requires skill, but often more sales than management.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y agoI 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.
- wellthisisgreat 5y agoThere 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.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago“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.
- a0-prw 5y agoYes, it's amazing how civilized people can be when their paycheck depends on it XD
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- paganel 5y agoThe 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. [1] https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210113-ndrangheta-crime-group-biggest-mafia-trial-in-decades-kicks-off-in-italy https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210113-ndrangheta-crime...
- spaetzleesser 5y agoTrue. El Chapo or Pablo Escobar were excellent leaders and businessmen besides being remorseless killers.
- wolverine876 5y agoWhat is that based on?
- spaetzleesser 5y agoThey 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
- TomAbel 5y agoHere 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] [1]https://erikbern.com/2018/08/16/business-secrets-from-terrible-people.html https://erikbern.com/2018/08/16/business-secrets-from-terrib... [2]https://www.economist.com/business/2014/06/25/narconomics https://www.economist.com/business/2014/06/25/narconomics Archive of the Economist article https://archive.md/EU3Wd https://archive.md/EU3Wd
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wolverine876 5y agoIf 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.
- avmich 5y agoBeria was, without a doubt, a cruel maniac. Chertok in his books - https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/rockets_people_vol1_detail.html 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.
- thriftwy 5y agoDoesn't mean you can't do the same by using the purse instead of the scourge. If two parties can't find an agreement, and they are told they both lose financing (or position) if they don't, they would suddenly discover it. Too many deadlocks in modern world which could be resolved a la Solomon.
- 5y ago
- BoxOfRain 5y agoThe 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: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_of_Lake_Karachay https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_of_Lake_Karachay
- rpeden 5y agoThe lake has some decently funny reviews on Google Maps.
- pjc50 5y agoThe 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.
- Koshkin 5y agoOr get fired at your workplace.
- caf 5y agoIn the Deadlines for Everyone story, isn't part of the joke that the prisoners have the possibility of parole, but the engineers don't?
- arpa 5y agowhen 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!
- quercusa 5y agoFor Soviet-era black humor, it's hard to beat the 2017 movie The Death of Stalin.
- mordechai9000 5y agoIt 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.
- cm2187 5y agoIf you want accuracy, a very good but slightly forgotten movie is a 1992 HBO movie called Stalin with Robert Duvall https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105462/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105462/
- 1cvmask 5y agoI 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.
- kybernetikos 5y agoArmando 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.
- publicola1990 5y agoIt 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.
- MichaelMoser123 5y agothat was a british movie, though it had some soviet era characters, that is true.
- the_af 5y ago> 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.
- jtbayly 5y agoYou’re definitely reading more into this article than he is into Soviet society.
- beervirus 5y agoI think he’s just saying that self-congratulatory stuff, from any source, is expected and unenlightening.
- the_af 5y agoI 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.
- google234123 5y agoIf 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.
- the_af 5y agoThanks 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.
- kingofclams 5y agoReminds me of Reagan telling Soviet jokes. https://youtu.be/mN3z3eSVG7A https://youtu.be/mN3z3eSVG7A
- 1cvmask 5y agoThat's what first came to mind. What a joker he was. His roasts from the 1970s are beyond hilarious as well. From the comments of that link: In America, when you tell Soviet jokes, everyone die laughing In Soviet Russia, you tell Soviet jokes, everyone laughing die.
- throwaway984393 5y agoSurely we shouldn't look at these subjects with blinders on. I'm sure the Soviet Union has done some evil deeds and killed scores of people in service of national zealotry, then tried to cover it up. But what global superpower hasn't? Realpolitik is an inevitable consequence of the modern world.
- davidgay 5y agoYou forgot the word "millions" (really). Changes things a bit.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoPlease don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. They're tedious, predictable (just look at the predictable responses below) and usually turn nasty. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- throwaway984393 5y agoI 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.
- dang 5y agoSorry, 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.
- motohagiography 5y agoI 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.
- dmz73 5y agoLife 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.
- simonh 5y agoThe 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dmz73 5y agoI 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.
- 1cvmask 5y agoMe favorite Beria quote is: Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime. - https://www.oxfordeagle.com/2018/05/09/show-me-the-man-and-ill-show-you-the-crime/ https://www.oxfordeagle.com/2018/05/09/show-me-the-man-and-i... - Unfortunately we have a similar set up here as well: Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229 https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
- IgorPartola 5y agoI 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”.
- tada131 5y agoRussian 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.
- Tuna-Fish 5y agoIt'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.
- inglor_cz 5y agoIDK 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.
- watersb 5y agoJokes 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.
- bidivia 5y ago[flagged]
- stjohnswarts 5y agoI had to stop at >> 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?
- simonh 5y agoBeria versions of humorous anecdotes and quotes eh? Feynman is cool, but let me try a Churchill one. Lady at Dinner: "Mr Beria, you are dunk!" Beria: "I may be drunk Madame, but in the morning I shall be sober, whereas you will be shot."
- bambax 5y ago> 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.
- rtpg 5y agoI 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.
- rossdavidh 5y agoSo I guess I'm just a bad person, but after reading this article my thoughts were: 1) the book seems funny, I wish it were available in English 2) the author of this article seems to have not much of a sense of humor
- jmnicolas 5y agoI 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. Good times.
- ogurechny 5y agoQ: Rabinovich, what is a fortune? A: A fortune is to live in our Socialist motherland. Q: And what's a misfortune? A: A misfortune is to have such a fortune. There is a number of Wikipedia articles belonging to the interesting kind and other examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_jokes&oldid=1045871866 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_jokes&old... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_political_jokes&oldid=1056211722 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_political... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=East_German_jokes&oldid=1052966442 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=East_German_jokes... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jewish_humor&oldid=1055268021 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jewish_humor&oldi... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Radio_Yerevan_jokes&oldid=1042026594 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Radio_Yerevan_jok... https://www.johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm https://www.johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm http://www.armeniapedia.org/index.php?title=Radio_Yerevan_Jokes http://www.armeniapedia.org/index.php?title=Radio_Yerevan_Jo...