Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria
blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria
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Re: Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria
#2Beria really was in charge of the early Soviet nuclear weapons program, and, while everyone was terrified of him, he was apparently good at managing the program.
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.
Re: Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria
#3In the Deadlines for Everyone story, isn't part of the joke that the prisoners have the possibility of parole, but the engineers don't?
Re: Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria
#4For Soviet-era black humor, it's hard to beat the 2017 movie The Death of Stalin.
Re: Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria
#5> Some of the stories are more in the line of “hooray for Soviet scientists” genre, which I find a lot less interesting
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.
Re: Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria
#6> Some of the stories are more in the line of “hooray for Soviet scientists” genre, which I find a lot less interesting 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 se…
You’re definitely reading more into this article than he is into Soviet society.
Re: Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria
#7Reminds me of Reagan telling Soviet jokes.
https://youtu.be/mN3z3eSVG7A
Re: Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria
#8Beria really was in charge of the early Soviet nuclear weapons program, and, while everyone was terrified of him, he was apparently good at managing the program. 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 awa…
" he was apparently good at managing the program."
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.
Re: Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria
#9For Soviet-era black humor, it's hard to beat the 2017 movie The Death of Stalin .
It was hilarious, but not very accurate. I don't expect accuracy from a film like that, but it's good to keep in mind. Beria was even worse than they depicted. He was a sadistic serial killer and sexual predator.
Re: Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria
#10Richard Rhodes’s _Dark Sun_ covers the Soviet atomic bomb program. Beria would share secrets only with Khurchatov, and it seemed that the benefit was confirmation and avoiding dead-ends.