It’s honestly more the romance part that ticks me off
My standard is starving to death mining gold in the freezing taiga or fighting on the eastern front
You don’t think people in those conditions engage in romance? I mean, maybe not in the mines, lol, but in times of desperation people tent to attach quickly and firmly. This explains the lifelong strength of “the brotherhood” in troops who see action.
But I’m a hopeless romantic, and my evidence for the above is that many of the books and articles I’ve read, fiction and non, offer that as a component, which of course I read because I like that as a component of my grinding misery or deadly conditions.
I really like redemptive moments. Kindness to vulnerable people and creatures, moral behavior against the odds, love of whatever stripe…this is what held me to All The Light We Cannot See; so much love and decency wound through, even if only wished (as when Werner becomes uncomfortable with the treatment of others at school, but can’t quite stand up).
@Polar-Bear I’ve downloaded a sample of The Fault in Our Stars.
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Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn cover this white extensively- apparently the conditions left convicts emotionally dead. No “brotherhood”
True
House of Leaves No doubt.
All books from Beevor are excellent. Ardennes is well worth a read.
I remember reading his “Battle of Spain” about the Spanish Civil War and an equally hilarious quote from a NKVD report about deployed Soviet advisors “our comrades have some difficulties adapting to the Spanish custom of serving wine during lunch, especially as the quantities are limited”
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My favourite!!!
There’s another story in Stalingrad where airlifted food supplies were dropped randomly, but vodka was carefully parachuted down
I’ve probably mentioned this before to you (I’m too lazy to search the forum), but do read Vodka Politics by Mark Lawrence Schrad. It explains many facets of Russian culture that Westerners find so mystifying.
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Just downloaded it from my school library- very interesting
particularly this:
"In practical terms, this means that the normal Russian drinking man downs 180 bott les of vodka per year—or a half bott le per day . . . and that is the average . "
If you think about it, Russians are quite amazing. They managed to ward off two major invasions and compete intellectually and militarily with the US for almost 50 years despite being a nation of alcoholics ruled by corrupt, drunken geriatrics
Disagree with the former, agree with the latter. The swing set was just too heavy handed symbolism for me. There are a lot of other examples.
I did like the story, just didn’t think it was well written, and was a bit maudlin. My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picooult was better written, but equally maudlin.
Food for thought.
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Brave New World? Down and Out in London and Paris? Fahrenheit 451?
Go dystopian or go home?
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But if you go dystopian you’re already home.
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That was a 50 year illusion.
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I have no idea what you are talking about.
Facetious.
Cheers.
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They put a huge emphasis on education (especially STEM) and increasing literacy rates. My parents are from the USSR; I was born in Russia a year after the Union dissolved but moved to Australia when I was a kid. Both my parents have at least a bachelor’s in a STEM field, with my dad having a masters. My maternal grandfather is a professor, my grandmother is a doktor nauk. Even now, modern Russia produces something like 2x the number of engineering graduates a year than the US, despite having less than half the population. Unfortunately they’ve been hampered by idiotic autocratic leaders for most of their history so a lot of this talent is wasted.
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No they’re not. They just have (well, had) vast reserves of manpower and had no qualms about spending it liberally, with absurd levels of wastage. WW1 and WW2 were extremes but not that unusual. During Tsarist times, conscription was a basically a prolonged death sentence.
And lost decisively in the Russo-Japanese war.
Extracted a lot of wealth from their pseudo-colonial empire. In addition, Khruschev invented the concept of competing with the US on the cheap, either with novelty technological marvels (Sputnik), relatively cheap anti-colonial wars in Africa, or more dangerously, by stationing missiles on Cuba.
That’s a fairly recent phenomenon, as they could not attract foreign talent.
If you look at Tsarist Russian the majority of high ranking educated professionals were Baltic German (the Black Baron Wrangel for example), Scottish (the Barclay clan), Irish (Lacys) and so on.
John Paul Jones also served in the Russian Navy and famously got into a fist fight with Grigory Potemkin over a fourteen year old girl of loose morals.
Russia wouldn’t be Russia without idiotic autocratic leaders - no wars for supremacy over Novgorod, no expansion into Siberia and so on. You’d have a border somewhere beyond the Urals between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and one of the Khanates.
That’s the shit. While any title is impressive, you cannot do better than being a doktor fiziko-matematicheskih nauk.
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Trust me, I have 0 respect for the Russian/Soviet government. I just find the region so fascinating
They were very wasteful with their people, but the idea of hoards of Soviets overwhelming the Germans during WWII is a myth. Also, a lot of the casualties were due to bureaucratic ineptitude
yep…
Don’t forget using espionage to steal other’s secrets- that is a skill though 
Germany is a country I genuinely respect.
THat is some serious Brother’s Karamazov shit
Is that like a double PhD in physics and math- sounds terrifying
Absolutely. In particular the Russian literary tradition is second to none. Tolstoy is Shakespeare’s peer in terms of elucidating the human condition.
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Agree! It’s amazing how motivating vodka money can be!
I personally prefer Dostoevsky and Turngev. Tolstoy wrote too much about rich ppl doing stupid things and his distortions of history rub me the wrong way
I had to read them in school and have to say that I disliked almost all of them, the only exception being Lermontov’s Hero of our time.
It is set partially in the Caucasus and has duels, horseback sword fights and Circassian villains, unlike the more typical “threw myself under a train because I’ve been spurned by my lover”.
Speaking of Russian literature, have you read Ilf and Petrov’s One Storied America (Odenomazhnaya Amerika)?
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