10 ms·

Surely You're Joking, Comrade Beria (2021)

74 points by skanderbm 3y ago

dang 3y ago
Discussed at the time (of the article): Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29284537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29284537 - Nov 2021 (133 comments)
aebtebeten 3y ago
"They didn't get shot" is maybe a little funnier when it's told in the shared context of a whole series of these anecdotes differing only in detail; the one I've heard involves Stalin demanding "who sneezed?" to a petrified delegation, only to say "bless you" after the guilty party has quickly been denounced by his comrades. I wouldn't be surprised if there are versions of these involving Tsars.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  > Tsar To be fair you have to go really far to get back to the times when the Tsar could and would execute random people for arbitrary reasons and without that the joke is no longer funny.
  - mc32 3y ago
    Indeed, the later tsars were pretty liberal and were the ones who ended slavery/serfdom in the Russian empire.
    - ak217 3y ago
      Tsar, singular. One tsar was relatively liberal, Alexander II. He did well under the circumstances, but his good deeds were overwhelmed by the imperial family and system that he was a part of.
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    > ...go really far to get back... While I did appreciate Ivan Grozny seeing the Repin painting in Shurik's apartment in Ivan Vasilevich menyaet professiyu (1973), I was a bit disappointed in that (at least with the youtube version?) the actor turned his back before crossing himself in the elevator, which would've told us if Gaidai knew/cared about Old Believer sibboleths.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    The last czar (Nickolas II) was pretty brutal. He instigated a reign of terror after the failed revolution in 1905. Vladimir Korolenko described it pretty well in "Everyday Phenomenon" (1910), and "Features of Military Justice".
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      As I understand it, the KGB inherited their dirty tricks bag from the Cheka, whose members had learned them the hard way from being on the receiving end, taught by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana .
      - cyberax 3y ago
        Not really. The USSR did not allow any members of the Imperial police to join the USSR secret service (it was initially called OGPU). They also functioned quite differently, the Imperial security had never had a fraction of OGPU's power, so the methods were different. OGPU didn't care at all about planting evidence or manipulating witnesses, they could just torture people into signing confessions (called "the queen of all kinds of evidence" by the USSR chief prosecutor). So any similarities are probably just a result of parallel evolution.
    - ffgjgf1 3y ago
      Sure the Tsarist regime was very brutal and oppressive however it still had a somewhat functioning and somewhat independent judicial system (of course extrajudicial murder/executions still occurred quite frequently but not even remotely as frequently as in the USSR). But more importantly in this case Nicholas didn’t have nearly as much direct power as Stalin did (he was extremely incompetent as outright stupid as a person) and had to rely on his government to actually make the tough decisions.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
denton-scratch 3y ago
> Or maybe it’s part of the “Stalin wasn’t so bad” nationalist revisionism that has been building in Putin’s 21st-century Russian Federation. Putin himself seems to deplore Stalin; I think partly because it was Stalin that made Ukraine a soviet republic distinct from Russia. It's quite odd; Putin seems to be the most Stalin-like leader Russia has had since - well, Stalin. I have no way of knowing what ordinary Russians think of Stalin; I've not seen a Levada Centre poll on the question.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  At this point, in 2024, ordinary Russians probably choose to think of Stalin whatever Putin thinks of Stalin, and are ready to put an apology video on social media if they happen to punt in the wrong direction. (Being downvoted for this is a trip. Yes it's a joke, and hyperbole. But you know it is also true in substance.)
- shakow 3y ago
  > Putin seems to be the most Stalin-like leader Russia has had since - well, Stalin I would argue he is much closer to the tsars in the following aspects: - incestuous state-church relationship (it took for WWII to happen for Stalin to let a bit of leeway to the Orthodox church) to enforce the state legitimacy; - dreams about re-building an imperial Russia directly under Moscow rule (Stalin focused on “Socialism in one country” after the failure of the USSR/Poland war and then went down the “buffer-states belt” policy post-WWII); - deliberately exhibits lavish luxury (Stalin had a life style that was closer to wealthy retired US surgeon – by which I mean a couple villas and nice cars – than imperial Archduke) - and no realistic, well-anchored long term view for the country – safe for making him and his cronies wealthier (this is not an apology of stalinism and its hundreds of thousands of murdered, but at least Stalin had an idea of where the Soviet Union was, where he wanted it to be, and what was materially required for that).
  - tomohawk 3y ago
    The Russian Orthodox Church was completely subverted by the KGB and still carries that legacy and purpose. The church never reformed after the USSR went kaput. It is used by Putin to spy on and keep people in line. Putin is also a creature of the KGB. As an example of the fascist/statist bent of this organization, check out the artwork in this cathedral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgQNs5GUyU4&pp=ygUZcnVzc2lhIG1pbGl0YXJ5IGNhdGhlZHJhbA%3D%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgQNs5GUyU4&pp=ygUZcnVzc2lhI...
medo-bear 3y ago
> Or maybe it’s part of the “Stalin wasn’t so bad” nationalist revisionism that has been building in Putin’s 21st-century Russian Federation. I think it is worth pointing out that Stalin and Beria were actually Georgian, not Russian. Additionally, the architect of what was later known as the KGB was a Pole, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Here is an interesting excerpt from the Dzerzhinsky entry in Wikipedia about an exchange with Lenin (who was actually Russian) on the question of Soviet policy on nationalities, April 1917 Party Conference, when Lenin accused Dzerzhinsky of Great-Russian chauvinism, he replied: "I can reproach him (Lenin) with standing at the point of view of the Polish, Ukrainian and other chauvinists." Today Putin often says that Vladimir Lenin is responsible for giving national minorities the freedoms they continue to enjoy today (some in form of independent statehood). He says this in a negative tone, and often equates it to placing a nuclear bomb under Russia. My reason for pointing this out is that Soviet history is really peculiar and one has to be careful with saying Soviet = Russian.
- skeletal88 3y ago
  Yes, but the thing is that Poland and Ukraine did not really want to be a part of the evil empire. It just enabled some ambitious people who were not russian to raise to a leadershio position. If a high ranking leader would have been estonian then you still could not say that because of this the soviet union would be "less russian" or something. Most of the people, officials, party members etc were russian and the soviet union was born from the russian empire.
carlosjobim 3y ago
Beria was not only a bolshevik mass murderer and torturer of the common kind. According to the memoirs of Khrushchev, Beria was also a serial killer. He would haunt the Moscow streets in his car at night, having his body guard pick up any girl he fancied. Those women would be taken to his house, where he'd drug them, rape them and sometimes kill them. Many times very young girls. The body guards would then be tasked with burying the corpses in his yard. Afterwards the bodyguard gave a list of more than a hundred women who had been raped by Beria. This man almost became the Soviet leader after Stalin's death, but was outmanoeuvred and later executed. According to Khrushchev, even Stalin feared Beria at times. From Khrushchev: "When Rudenko began the interrogation of Beria, a monstrous person was revealed before our eyes, a dreadful beast for whom nothing was sacred."
- NiteOwl066 3y ago
  While it might be true I think it's worth pointing out that Khrushchev and Beria were in rivalry for power. And I would be surprised if in his memoirs he wouldn't have painted Beria as the bad guy. So I think we should take all those memories with a grain of salt at best and understand that all those stories might be twisted or even completely false.
  - mc32 3y ago
    It's pretty clear that despite the color or bias, Beria was unequivocally a bad person. Bad in all ways.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    It does have a big QAnon "baby-eating" feel about it yes. Especially considering that even Soviet state leaders lived in pretty small houses by Western standards, it's pretty unlikely that they had the space to bury hundreds of corpses. The Soviets were really big on rewriting history and they spent a lot of time editing photos of stalin with people that later fell out of grace. But I'm sure he was a bad person indeed. I don't think you could rise to such a position without being one until the lighter age appeared that led to Gorbachev.
photochemsyn 3y ago
Atomic Cafe is a very funny take on origins of the bomb and the birth of the Cold War's nuclear standoff - with lots of grim material though, such as the original films of the effects of nuclear weapons on Japanese people, i.e. the material that was left out of "Oppenheimer". Atomic Cafe is available online in full: https://youtu.be/i9xQTJ-kbUk https://youtu.be/i9xQTJ-kbUk
throwaway6525 3y ago
"I'm not joking, and don't call me Shirley" -- Beria
lenerdenator 3y ago
Beria was not the kind of man to joke.
- southernplaces7 3y ago
  By many accounts he was actually, with quite a sense of humor about certain (often awful) things. Being a monstrous rapist serial killer genocidal secret police boss doesn't remove one from having other human traits like the ability to crack jokes.
karaterobot 3y ago
> The problem is, of course, that such levity gets undercut I don't think that's true. That is, I'm sure it's true for the author of this article, but it's not true for the people involved. Humor has always thrived in dark times and places. What is viewed as grim and humorless from the outside is often not seen that way from within, else the grimness itself is what creates the response of humor. Is the idea that Soviet nuclear researchers should have spent their lives in morose silence because their facilities were built with gulag labor? It would be one thing for a click-bait writer with no understanding of history to take this position, but being a historian, I'm surprised the author of this excellent website does.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
With respect to the XKCD cartoon, I am sure it killed all cancer cells within a certain radius of the blast, and it was thus a success. It turns out hydrogen bombs have even a bigger cancer cell killing radius than atomic bombs.
Mikhail_K 3y ago
Wellerstein prides himself on being able to read Russian, but he is not as good at it as he thinks. Specifically, translating the title of the section "Атомные байки" as "Atomic fun" is simply inadequate. Here <https://en.pons.com/translate/russian-english/%D0%B1%D0%B0%CC%81%D0%B9%D0%BA%D0%B0?q=%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BA%D0%B0 https://en.pons.com/translate/russian-english/%D0%B1%D0%B0%C...>, for instance, the second word is correctly translated as "fairy-tale, fable, old wives' tale". So to sum up, his whole blog post is based on mistranslation

74 points by skanderbm 3y ago

dang 3y ago

Discussed at the time (of the article): Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29284537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29284537 - Nov 2021 (133 comments)

aebtebeten 3y ago

"They didn't get shot" is maybe a little funnier when it's told in the shared context of a whole series of these anecdotes differing only in detail; the one I've heard involves Stalin demanding "who sneezed?" to a petrified delegation, only to say "bless you" after the guilty party has quickly been denounced by his comrades. I wouldn't be surprised if there are versions of these involving Tsars.

ffgjgf1 3y ago
> Tsar To be fair you have to go really far to get back to the times when the Tsar could and would execute random people for arbitrary reasons and without that the joke is no longer funny.
- mc32 3y ago
  Indeed, the later tsars were pretty liberal and were the ones who ended slavery/serfdom in the Russian empire.
  - ak217 3y ago
    Tsar, singular. One tsar was relatively liberal, Alexander II. He did well under the circumstances, but his good deeds were overwhelmed by the imperial family and system that he was a part of.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  > ...go really far to get back... While I did appreciate Ivan Grozny seeing the Repin painting in Shurik's apartment in Ivan Vasilevich menyaet professiyu (1973), I was a bit disappointed in that (at least with the youtube version?) the actor turned his back before crossing himself in the elevator, which would've told us if Gaidai knew/cared about Old Believer sibboleths.
- cyberax 3y ago
  The last czar (Nickolas II) was pretty brutal. He instigated a reign of terror after the failed revolution in 1905. Vladimir Korolenko described it pretty well in "Everyday Phenomenon" (1910), and "Features of Military Justice".
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    As I understand it, the KGB inherited their dirty tricks bag from the Cheka, whose members had learned them the hard way from being on the receiving end, taught by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana .
    - cyberax 3y ago
      Not really. The USSR did not allow any members of the Imperial police to join the USSR secret service (it was initially called OGPU). They also functioned quite differently, the Imperial security had never had a fraction of OGPU's power, so the methods were different. OGPU didn't care at all about planting evidence or manipulating witnesses, they could just torture people into signing confessions (called "the queen of all kinds of evidence" by the USSR chief prosecutor). So any similarities are probably just a result of parallel evolution.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    Sure the Tsarist regime was very brutal and oppressive however it still had a somewhat functioning and somewhat independent judicial system (of course extrajudicial murder/executions still occurred quite frequently but not even remotely as frequently as in the USSR). But more importantly in this case Nicholas didn’t have nearly as much direct power as Stalin did (he was extremely incompetent as outright stupid as a person) and had to rely on his government to actually make the tough decisions.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

denton-scratch 3y ago

> Or maybe it’s part of the “Stalin wasn’t so bad” nationalist revisionism that has been building in Putin’s 21st-century Russian Federation. Putin himself seems to deplore Stalin; I think partly because it was Stalin that made Ukraine a soviet republic distinct from Russia. It's quite odd; Putin seems to be the most Stalin-like leader Russia has had since - well, Stalin. I have no way of knowing what ordinary Russians think of Stalin; I've not seen a Levada Centre poll on the question.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
At this point, in 2024, ordinary Russians probably choose to think of Stalin whatever Putin thinks of Stalin, and are ready to put an apology video on social media if they happen to punt in the wrong direction. (Being downvoted for this is a trip. Yes it's a joke, and hyperbole. But you know it is also true in substance.)
shakow 3y ago
> Putin seems to be the most Stalin-like leader Russia has had since - well, Stalin I would argue he is much closer to the tsars in the following aspects: - incestuous state-church relationship (it took for WWII to happen for Stalin to let a bit of leeway to the Orthodox church) to enforce the state legitimacy; - dreams about re-building an imperial Russia directly under Moscow rule (Stalin focused on “Socialism in one country” after the failure of the USSR/Poland war and then went down the “buffer-states belt” policy post-WWII); - deliberately exhibits lavish luxury (Stalin had a life style that was closer to wealthy retired US surgeon – by which I mean a couple villas and nice cars – than imperial Archduke) - and no realistic, well-anchored long term view for the country – safe for making him and his cronies wealthier (this is not an apology of stalinism and its hundreds of thousands of murdered, but at least Stalin had an idea of where the Soviet Union was, where he wanted it to be, and what was materially required for that).
- tomohawk 3y ago
  The Russian Orthodox Church was completely subverted by the KGB and still carries that legacy and purpose. The church never reformed after the USSR went kaput. It is used by Putin to spy on and keep people in line. Putin is also a creature of the KGB. As an example of the fascist/statist bent of this organization, check out the artwork in this cathedral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgQNs5GUyU4&pp=ygUZcnVzc2lhIG1pbGl0YXJ5IGNhdGhlZHJhbA%3D%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgQNs5GUyU4&pp=ygUZcnVzc2lhI...

medo-bear 3y ago

> Or maybe it’s part of the “Stalin wasn’t so bad” nationalist revisionism that has been building in Putin’s 21st-century Russian Federation. I think it is worth pointing out that Stalin and Beria were actually Georgian, not Russian. Additionally, the architect of what was later known as the KGB was a Pole, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Here is an interesting excerpt from the Dzerzhinsky entry in Wikipedia about an exchange with Lenin (who was actually Russian) on the question of Soviet policy on nationalities, April 1917 Party Conference, when Lenin accused Dzerzhinsky of Great-Russian chauvinism, he replied: "I can reproach him (Lenin) with standing at the point of view of the Polish, Ukrainian and other chauvinists." Today Putin often says that Vladimir Lenin is responsible for giving national minorities the freedoms they continue to enjoy today (some in form of independent statehood). He says this in a negative tone, and often equates it to placing a nuclear bomb under Russia. My reason for pointing this out is that Soviet history is really peculiar and one has to be careful with saying Soviet = Russian.

skeletal88 3y ago
Yes, but the thing is that Poland and Ukraine did not really want to be a part of the evil empire. It just enabled some ambitious people who were not russian to raise to a leadershio position. If a high ranking leader would have been estonian then you still could not say that because of this the soviet union would be "less russian" or something. Most of the people, officials, party members etc were russian and the soviet union was born from the russian empire.

carlosjobim 3y ago

Beria was not only a bolshevik mass murderer and torturer of the common kind. According to the memoirs of Khrushchev, Beria was also a serial killer. He would haunt the Moscow streets in his car at night, having his body guard pick up any girl he fancied. Those women would be taken to his house, where he'd drug them, rape them and sometimes kill them. Many times very young girls. The body guards would then be tasked with burying the corpses in his yard. Afterwards the bodyguard gave a list of more than a hundred women who had been raped by Beria. This man almost became the Soviet leader after Stalin's death, but was outmanoeuvred and later executed. According to Khrushchev, even Stalin feared Beria at times. From Khrushchev: "When Rudenko began the interrogation of Beria, a monstrous person was revealed before our eyes, a dreadful beast for whom nothing was sacred."

NiteOwl066 3y ago
While it might be true I think it's worth pointing out that Khrushchev and Beria were in rivalry for power. And I would be surprised if in his memoirs he wouldn't have painted Beria as the bad guy. So I think we should take all those memories with a grain of salt at best and understand that all those stories might be twisted or even completely false.
- mc32 3y ago
  It's pretty clear that despite the color or bias, Beria was unequivocally a bad person. Bad in all ways.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  It does have a big QAnon "baby-eating" feel about it yes. Especially considering that even Soviet state leaders lived in pretty small houses by Western standards, it's pretty unlikely that they had the space to bury hundreds of corpses. The Soviets were really big on rewriting history and they spent a lot of time editing photos of stalin with people that later fell out of grace. But I'm sure he was a bad person indeed. I don't think you could rise to such a position without being one until the lighter age appeared that led to Gorbachev.

photochemsyn 3y ago

Atomic Cafe is a very funny take on origins of the bomb and the birth of the Cold War's nuclear standoff - with lots of grim material though, such as the original films of the effects of nuclear weapons on Japanese people, i.e. the material that was left out of "Oppenheimer". Atomic Cafe is available online in full: https://youtu.be/i9xQTJ-kbUk https://youtu.be/i9xQTJ-kbUk

throwaway6525 3y ago

"I'm not joking, and don't call me Shirley" -- Beria

lenerdenator 3y ago

Beria was not the kind of man to joke.

southernplaces7 3y ago
By many accounts he was actually, with quite a sense of humor about certain (often awful) things. Being a monstrous rapist serial killer genocidal secret police boss doesn't remove one from having other human traits like the ability to crack jokes.

karaterobot 3y ago

> The problem is, of course, that such levity gets undercut I don't think that's true. That is, I'm sure it's true for the author of this article, but it's not true for the people involved. Humor has always thrived in dark times and places. What is viewed as grim and humorless from the outside is often not seen that way from within, else the grimness itself is what creates the response of humor. Is the idea that Soviet nuclear researchers should have spent their lives in morose silence because their facilities were built with gulag labor? It would be one thing for a click-bait writer with no understanding of history to take this position, but being a historian, I'm surprised the author of this excellent website does.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

With respect to the XKCD cartoon, I am sure it killed all cancer cells within a certain radius of the blast, and it was thus a success. It turns out hydrogen bombs have even a bigger cancer cell killing radius than atomic bombs.

Mikhail_K 3y ago

Wellerstein prides himself on being able to read Russian, but he is not as good at it as he thinks. Specifically, translating the title of the section "Атомные байки" as "Atomic fun" is simply inadequate. Here <https://en.pons.com/translate/russian-english/%D0%B1%D0%B0%CC%81%D0%B9%D0%BA%D0%B0?q=%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BA%D0%B0 https://en.pons.com/translate/russian-english/%D0%B1%D0%B0%C...>, for instance, the second word is correctly translated as "fairy-tale, fable, old wives' tale". So to sum up, his whole blog post is based on mistranslation