Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era | Hacker News Reader

Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

mirtitles.org

183 pointsclmul92 comments

I loved these old books. I think I had the Seven Clam Sisters or something like it. My parents managed to rescue and bring to the US two childhood stories I really enjoyed: The Long Haired Maiden, and Shihan and the Snail[0].

These old folk tales are really entertaining. Often there’s no real moral or anything. It’s just a story. And to this day I really like these stories that are just “this happened and that person did that” and so on which don’t have to say “And the message is X”.

Unrelatedly, my wife jokes that I ended up marrying a Taiwanese woman because my childhood was spent reading folk tales about Chinese women.

0: both these are somewhere on archive.org e.g. https://archive.org/details/thelonghairedmaiden

Thanks for sharing the link. The Long Haired Maiden was beautifully illustrated and i enjoyed the story.

These were big in India until the mid-90s. I recall one book of "tales from the Baltic states" which we had at home. There were others, but I can't remember the titles very well. And for stuff coming from the Soviet era, they were remarkably non-judgy about the Tsareivichs and Tsarinas who inhabited the tales...

On the technical front, one book that I fondly recall, but I haven't seen since is Experiments Without Explosion by O.M.Olgin: https://archive.org/details/ExperimentsWithoutExplosions The title, as well as the content...

> I recall one book of "tales from the Baltic states" which we had at home.

That sounds interesting. Could it be this one I just photographed from my library?: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Folk_Tales_From_The_Sov...

Books being far more precious in those days, we kept these preserved, and my parents have brought them here so that my children may also experience the breadth of story-telling in other cultures.

Here are a few others from the series: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Folk_Tales_From_The_Sov... and https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Folk_Tales_From_The_Sov...

My greatest regret is not preserving the few African folktales anthologies that my parents bought me when I was young. I've found that different peoples have quite a variation of stories, and few are easily available today in English, with a great smearing of culture across most of the world with the Anglophone dominance and the shift to a visual medium as opposed to text.

But at least I have only a semi-Bowdlerized (i.e. early 1900s modern) version of tales by the Brothers Grimm and so on.

Maintainer/curator of the blog here. Please feel free to ask anything.

Glad to see this on the front page on HN, we had a similar bump some years back!

Very cool.

(Love to also see a collection of Soviet Life magazine. What's out there, that I have been able to find, is pretty slim.)

Magazines are tricky to get hold of, as they were ephemeral and not seen to be of lasting value. Two magazines which we have been looking for are Misha! (though some volumes are there) and Science in the USSR, ( I distinctly remember one with interviews about great Lev Landau by his colleagues).

Misha and Soviet Woman were quite common in the 80s. I remember that the paper and print was much better than what we were used to.

I inherited a large (to me) collection of books from the USSR from my grandfather who immigrated here. Do you know how someone could find a collector or something who would appreciate them? I'm not looking to make money here, I just don't want the books to stay on the shelf of someone who will never read or appreciate them.

We could host them, I personally have a collection of about 2k Soviet books, about 6-7k in total.

Do you have an email? Most of these are going to be medical books. Would love to connect.

Yes, please write to us at mirtitles at the rate gmail

It’s amusing how many of us on this thread are South Asians (you surely must be from “At the rate”, and I recognize some commenters here to be so from other conversations and others from their names). I wonder if we were the top English readership for this publisher.

Any idea of the topics?

Medicine and jokes

Thank you for the effort of putting together the site and material, making the world a better place.

Hi! Is it possible to grab all these books as one bundle? I want to keep them locally for preservation and my kids when they grow up

You can download the entire collection via our Internet Archive collection. You can use the export option from advanced search and keep mir-titles as the collection, then use wget or curl to download all of them.

Have you thought about a printing service so people can order hard copies from you/your-company? It will allow you to maintain/fund this work which i think is very much needed.

Also maybe redesign the site so it is more easily searchable (fast, functional but no jazz).

I have bought a few print copies from low-cost publishers on Amazon India but the quality has been iffy. Would be willing to pay extra for better quality.

Yes, there was something in the pipeline to print, nicely (re)typeset books around the time covid stuck and the plan got sidelines. Will see if there is a possibility again.

We are using worpdress.com for the hosting, so that more focus is on curating the content with minimum maintenance required (it is mostly me, with little help from colleagues every now and then).

A discussion on this happened recently here*:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739003

Someone (@rramadass) made me a good set of recommendations from the titles.

* Edit: I see now that linked comment too is from @clmul, the OP here. Thanks clmul!

Oh right, I saw that comment too, and grabbed a bunch of interesting-looking books on mathematics. Glad the website got more attention, good stuff!

Yep, i have been recommending these books and this site for a while now.

The reason? See my comment from 7 years ago! - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21351115

The younger generation in particular need to know of these excellent resources for Science/Mathematics.

Another good publisher of old/classic Science/Mathematics books is "Dover Publications" - https://store.doverpublications.com/

Checkout for example, the books by Richard Hamming, in particular; "Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics" - https://store.doverpublications.com/products/9780486439457 (highly relevant to today's needs).

Also checkout the book series (mathematics via correspondence for high-school students) by I.M.Gelfand - https://store.doverpublications.com/search?type=product&q=I....

They were very cheap, and some like Landau and Lifschitz's textbooks on physics, world-class (and extremely challenging, volume 1 on mechanics assumed mastery of the calculus of variations).

Since we are on the topic of russian literature I'd definitely recommend reading something other than the usual suspects Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

One of my personal favourites is Bulgakov'с Master and Margarita and The Bull's Hour by Ivan Efremov.

Bull's Hour is actually amazing as it explores societies built on different principles using a form of a novel.

Some of the titles aren't translated - a cursory search did not turn up a downloadable version of the Bull's Hour, but search flibusta - titles are in russian but thanks to AI ...

>"Dostoevsky and Tolstoy"

I was born in USSR and was an still am avid reader. However never liked either of those two.

Totally agree about Efremov. Great writer

Better link? https://archive.org/details/mir-titles

thanks for this link, it's a great find!

Curator/maintainer of Mir Titles here.

The blog and the archive page are not in sync, we try to publish one book a day on the blog. The archive collection has more (recent) titles than the blog.

Good to know! Why do all posts on your blog have the "follow us" with all the social links though? Seems like a lot of wasted space on the whole webpage

Well, there is a template that we use for scheduling the posts, the link panel is a part of that. Idea is to reach out to many people.

I have very fond memory of these books. We are from lower middle class family in India. My dad was fond of books. Western books were costly, but Soviet and Chinese books were of high quality and cheap. So we used to get loads of them from book fair.

I, too, have very fond memories of Mir Publishers. I was on vacation in Greece and had a stop in Athens, where I found by chance a bookshop which had books from Mir. the shop had irregular opening times but I managed to get there as often as I could, the books were dirt cheap

We had these in Sri Lanka, some of it translated to the local language and published by local publishers. I can't remember whether it was specifically a Mir publication, but I have fond memories of Y. Perelman's Mathematics can be Fun -- beautifully printed and hardbound, with meticulously drawn line art illustrations covering various applications of mathematics.

https://mirtitles.org/?s=Yakov+Perelman

All of Perelman's books are a must read, particularly by students. Few books can better motivate you in Science/Mathematics.

We used to get these books in the annual international book fair in Delhi back in my childhood days. I still have 2 of them (Mathematics Can Be Fun and How The Steel Was Tempered), but I'm pretty sure we had several more at the time. They were fun reads, and the illustrations used to be great!

Anyone interested in Soviet-era anything could do worse than check out rutracker. It's pretty usable with in-browser translate. A lot of it is of course, just contemporary piracy of .ru and western media, but they have interesting archives too.

Very fond memories of Mir Publishers' science and math books growing up in India in the 80s and 90s. I think English translations were freely available in India. My grandfather would buy them for me to encourage my interest in science and math. If I could find physical copies of those books I would buy them in a heartbeat today.

Slight digression: Russian cartoons from that era are also very interesting. One of my favorite short cartoon from that era (I still hum its music involuntarily): Ikarus and the Wise Men [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Yk1mz23YFA

Highly recommend this is you ever need to study differential equations (I guess there may be still a reason for it?). Only thing that helped me pass the class

https://archive.org/details/m.-l.-krasnov-a.-i.-kiselyov-g.-...

I taught out of this book at Tulane and while it is a good problem book, some of the concept transitions don't flow well and you need another book or to write some supplementary notes. Also the section on Jacobians is pretty clearly lifted straight out of Pontryagin's book

I had a lot of these books as a kid. I'm not even 100% why, but my dad glommed on to the idea that they were of high quality, and also quite inexpensive. Probably my favorite was "Higher Mathematics for Beginners" by Yakov Zeldovich[1]. I was a voracious reader, and largely taught myself calculus from it. Another one on probability and statistics I also found quite accessible (can't find it immediately).

There were some other sketchier pop-sci books, I remember one that had the "water has structural memory" theory in it. But likely those didn't do any lasting damage.

[1]: https://mirtitles.org/2022/07/04/higher-mathematics-for-begi...

FYI - There is a later version of the above book titled "Higher Math for Beginners" (with Yaglom) and "Elements of Applied Mathematics" (with Myskis) - https://mirtitles.org/?s=zeldovich

Hard copy versions are available from Aargon Press on Amazon India.

Soviet books were a boon to the world. I thank Soviet scientists.

https://valeman.medium.com/the-men-who-translated-the-machin...

That is a pretty good and meaningful article.

It was the same with many other countries, whether English or Native languages.

I wish this kind of soft diplomacy was more common today.

It’s a lot cheaper than bombing schools.

Well there's your problem. You can't grift the stock markets over a weekend with a shipment of books.

I loved technical books from Mir publishers. Russian authors have a special place in my heart for explaining complex technical topics in concise yet engaging way.

Books like Problems In physics by I E Irodov were my favourites

i have very fond memories of mir books from my childhood, especially yakov perelman's outstanding maths and science for fun books.

Quick question.

What do soviets make great researchers? I noticed this pattern in ml, math & physics research.

Is it that they have better quality books?

They had a thing of encouraging talent and putting it in special schools to develop it. Then Maths reading groups etc.

Not only that. Corporations are filled with excellent software developers from Russia who did not go to any specialized schools or graduated from prestigious universities.

They have a very strong DIY culture which I'm sure helps with making people explore and discover knowledge and develop skill

I think part of it is that unlike in the US, access to education wasn't paywalled.

Higher education in the US, with the exception of scholarships here and there, requires you to come from a wealthy background to afford the best schools.

In other words, it's more about perpetuating class privilege than it is about developing the best and brightest of a generation. If you're a genius with poor parents, you have to really hope to get lucky enough to get a scholarship.

In socialist societies, despite the claims often leveled against them, things were more meritocratic. If you're a genius with poor parents, you got access to the best education as that's what's optimal for society.

It's also about poor children getting worse primary education . According to Google "roughly 21% of U.S. adults are functionally illiterate".

If you never learned to read, good luck getting higher education.

I'm not defending communist societies like Soviet Union or China but I think "social democratic" countries like those in Scandinavia have shown generally good education outcomes.

It's more like 4%

Description of different developer mindsets when they encounter a problem with a tool from a vendor.

Americans: contact the vendor and report the issue. Then wait for the vendor to fix it, applying pressure as needed. Because of the delay, the product ends up being 6 months late, but then it works reliably.

Russians: curse the vendor, then use undocumented APIs and live code patching to work around the bug. The vendor is never told about the issues. The product is released on time, but it breaks in 1 year when the vendor makes an incompatible change that breaks the workarounds.

This mindset is very much a result of centuries of having to work around the government that is seen more as an occupying force rather than the will of the people. And it's very helpful when you're doing security research.

Incidentally, Jewish people also excel in security due to a similar cultural mindset.

>This mindset is very much a result of centuries of having to work around the government that is seen more as an occupying force rather than the will of the people.

How do you people come up with such stories?

Hackernews thrives on users confidently making claims based on their own limited perspective and providing next to no reasoning or evidence.

I don't know... Maybe by growing up in Russia and starting my software career there?

To add some color, here is my favorite hard-to-translate idiom in a Russian developer community:

"File away rough edges" ("доработать напильником") - adjust something to work in a way that its original creator never even realized is possible. And usually for a good reason.

Of course, all generalizations should be taken with a grain of salt. They can never be used to judge individuals or even individual companies.

I still don't see how the government comes into play

I can't say anything about the "centuries" part, but the rest sort of checks. In those old soviet countries there was no such thing as "customer service", the politburo didn't get around inventing it and every economic cog was created from above. If a modern American had seen how things were done there, they would have wrongly assumed that a powerful pulp-and-paper lobby was in control. Also, when the thing in question was made in the West (which was often the case for high tech stuff), and somehow smuggled under the iron curtain and Western sanctions, customer support was unaffordable or simply out of reach.

This trope is very widely documented in Russian literature, in fact it's one of the "corner truth" of Russian existence.

Checkov, Gogol, Pushkin and Dostoyevsky all wrote novels with this exact plot, because it was so lifelike and tangible for all Russians (Soviets) to understand. If you're interested, check out The Bronze Horseman, The Overcoat, or Poor Folk.

Thank you for being familiar with Russian culture, but I don't remember these classics writing about casual link between oppression, suffering, depression and hacker mindset.

Me and cyberax are both Russians, except I never wanted to emigrate

Well, Gogol's "Dead Souls" is the first example of a lifehack.

I wouldn't call a deception "lifehack".

But anyway, what makes Chichikov's "lifehack" "a result of having to work around the government that is seen more as an occupying force rather than the will of the people"?

Math and physics are more theoretical in curriculum and less students can grasp, but ones who do perform better. So, higher input filter, earlier talent detection. Western education is more applied to a business, Russian is more like a generic theory. This makes Western schools prepare to develop, Russian to research. Note this is a generic distinction, MIT and Stanford are higher standards and provide access to field practitioners so my take it is genuinely provide more quality than MSU or Baumanka alike.

Competition. Nobody in the US cares about school math/physics/... olympiads. But they are/were a big deal in schools in the xUSSR.

There also was no centralized test system (like SAT) up until early 2000-s. People had to go and sit on entrance exams in each university where they wanted to apply. But winners of olympiads got automatic admission into good universities.

In addition, social sciences were a minefield in the USSR, especially subjects like political science or history. And hard sciences were safe.

For entrance exams though... At least in Poland, we had them as well. They were corrupt.

Cheating was rampant, and a very common way for getting admitted was paying professors from that uni for tutoring - who would train them on the type of tasks they would do at that uni.

And it prevented you from attending unis far away a lot of time due to time contraints.

Oh, absolutely. Especially for the top universities. That made olympiads even more important because they allowed students to bypass the exams.

And in the USSR, if you failed to get into the university, you were drafted into the army for 2 years.

Same in Poland. My civics teacher in high school was a historian.

He hated that, he wanted to be a lawyer. But he didn't get admitted to studies, so he had to pick something close in order not to be drafted, and so he stuck with it.

They would still nail you after university. For 1.5 years instead of 2.

Americans were great researchers at the time, as well. During the Cold War era, Soviet culture included an ambition to rival and surpass American research and technology.

mostly because people had no option to leave the country.

also the salaries of scientists and engineers were notoriously shitty, so only those with passion for the subject studied it.

Good thing we've overcome that! Today, in the land of the free, researchers' passion is rewarded with good salaries and working conditions. Right?

I assure you that Soviets did not have the kind of ```science``` that is temporarily defunded in the US.

Oh come on, Scientific Communism was even a separate discipline in universities.

yes, but Soviet communism was the "he who does not work, neither shall he eat" kind, not Cultural Marxism beloved by the Western academia. I'm sure even the people who studied hard sciences had to endure a few hours of commie bullshit each week, but just like in present day China, there were preciously few people who took it seriously. it was just nagruzka.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%80...

>In the USSR, retail stores weren't allowed to promptly raise prices on popular items or lower prices on unpopular ones. One way to circumvent this was through "loading": stores would combine a popular (scarce) item with one or more unpopular ones into "food sets" on their order desks, preventing customers from purchasing the scarce item separately.

Russians consider their profession a calling and try to be the best at it. Makes big difference when it's calling and not just-a-job.

I dunno what attitude russia's gen-z holds towards profession but in my time it was definitely considered a calling.

One word, "Culture";

See the comment by "elzbardico" here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738277

Sadly, current-day global culture/society does not value knowledge if it is not in the furtherance of capitalistic goals.

My favourite publisher from the 70's and 80's. Only a specific town in South India used to have a shop that sells Russian books and communist literature. Travelled to that town and bought a few chess books. "Domination in 2,545 Endgame Studies" by Gary Kasparyan was always in my hands.

Were they translated to Hindi or kept in their original language?

English

Here is the book, https://archive.org/download/domination-in-2-545-endgame-stu...

Maintainer/curator of Mir Titles here.

That's very nice. Thank you!

Anyone aware of any official/private efforts in China or Russia to digitize or republish these books. Nowdays, finding these books particularly in languages like Hindi is very difficult.

There are private efforts in Russia, but mostly they digitize Soviet-time books written in Russian or maybe in other languages spoken in Russia. (As far as I know, that is; I am, of course, not aware of the whole field.) Mir published in Russian too, but here it mostly printed translated works, a lot of scientifical and technical literature, a foreign sci-fi series and such. It was like a two-way enterprise, connecting USSR to the world.

Officially all this does not seem to be supported in any way, I'm afraid.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21351115

Reply on news.ycombinator.com