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Comment by dwd | Hacker News Reader

I thought the advanced team quickly building a log cabin to sleep in was very Russian.

I knew a guy years ago who kind-of described it as a right of passage that you would take a trip out into the woods and build your own cabin/dacha.

A Finnish friend sent me his pictures of building his, including the obligatory sauna.

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Wow, just realized English has two phrases that are homonyms but mean very different things:

• “rite of passage” = “a ceremony or event marking an important stage in someone's life”, “when an individual leaves one group to enter another”. (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rite_of_passage&o...)

• “right of passage” = right of way, “(approximately) a country's right for its ships to pass through the territorial seas of foreign states and straits used for international navigation”. (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Right_of_passage&...) Seems to be more often a typo for “rite of passage”.

Yes, rite of passage. Not sure how I managed to type the wrong spelling, brain seeming a bit glitchy.

It might be that Russians cooperate very well (I do definitely agree on that), but as the organisation grows bigger, it is definitely very Russian to not be able to do anything.

It's not a Russian trait, it's a common bureaucratic trait, and Soviet Union was bureaucratized over any sane limits.

One of signatures of Henry Spencer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer ) looks like this:

    -- 
    Americans proved to be more bureaucratic           |       Henry Spencer
    than I ever thought.  --Valery Ryumin, RKK Energia |   henry@zoo.toronto.edu

https://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/hydrogen.html

russians (and other citizens of soviet union) transitioned from serfdom to (at the time) bleeding edge political system. It required tremendeous amounts of bureaucracy in order to enforce ex-serfs not to get any funny ideas about their current 'freedom'.

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