Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria
blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Ah, an early version of Aumann's agreement theorem.
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.
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210113-ndrangheta-crime...
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-terrib...
[2]https://www.economist.com/business/2014/06/25/narconomics Archive of the Economist article https://archive.md/EU3Wd
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.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
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."
I wasn't trying to be argumentative. Just happy to expound on a topic I know something about.
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.
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.
Ideally?
Their countries are and will remain poor because they are idiots beyond what is necessary to stay in power. They aren't good administrators.
That requires skill, but often more sales than management.
He had to be good at something to get so far. I am just arguing that it is difficult to call it "management".
USSR collapsed in 70 years. RF is about 2x smaller, so it should collapse in 35 years -> 2026.
> 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.
At the very least it is not obvious whether threatening to fire/firing say 10% of under-performers would improve productivity for complex tasks.
There can be other ways to make people productive e.g., "psychological safety" https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful...
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.
I have no idea if those people were great manager or great despots there maybe a relation with how hard working they were
Scary thought for today: what happens when MAGA world finds someone with not just charisma, but competence and energy?
[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".
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.
No, I'll gladly both sides this.
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.
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'.)
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).
Same happened in Germany. Nazis turned practically overnight into exemplary democrats.
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).
> 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).
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.
Here's the joke: https://martyrmade.com/19-the-anti-humans/ (skip to 12:17) You can pretty much replace Poland with Romania, and many others and it works just as well.
Always very vocally being the most anti-communist person in the room might have been just a defensive strategy.
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.
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."
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!
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.
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.
Last I checked Kubrick wasn't working on the bombs himself.
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.
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.
Good times.
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&old...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_political...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=East_German_jokes...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jewish_humor&oldi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Radio_Yerevan_jok...
https://www.johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm
http://www.armeniapedia.org/index.php?title=Radio_Yerevan_Jo...
>> 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 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.
I highly recommend Stephen Kotkin's new 3-volume biography of Stalin.
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
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.
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.
Link for the lazy: https://onartandaesthetics.com/2018/10/03/the-gulag-collecti...
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.
> Lenin sits, cutting pieces from an apple with knife and eating them.
> A little child walks up and asks Lenin to get a bit of an apple.
> Lenin does not respond in any way and continues cutting and eating apple.
> Now, do you see what a kind man Lenin was? He could have stabbed.