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Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

mirtitles.org

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Re: Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

#71

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No. Soviet literature was intentionally translated and distributed abroad. That was the purpose of Mir, at least partially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_Soviet_Un...

They only joined the UCC (Geneva Copyright Treaty) in 1973 though. That was less than twenty years before the USSR ceased to exist. All the works published in the USSR before 1973 weren't copyrighted in the West (it wasn't retroactive).

Re: Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

#72
post #29

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.

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!

Re: Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

#73

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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.

Re: Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

#74

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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.

Re: Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

#75
post #17
post #15

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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 vendo…

>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?

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.

Re: Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

#76

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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.

Re: Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

#77
post #47

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 Exp…

> 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.

Re: Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

#78

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!

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.

Any idea of the topics?

Re: Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

#80
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

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

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