Discussed at the time (of the article):<p><i>Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29284537">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29284537</a> - Nov 2021 (133 comments)
"They didn't get shot" is maybe a little funnier when it's told in the shared context of a whole series of these anecdotes differing only in detail; the one I've heard involves Stalin demanding "who sneezed?" to a petrified delegation, only to say "bless you" after the guilty party has quickly been denounced by his comrades. I wouldn't be surprised if there are versions of these involving Tsars.
Atomic Cafe is a very funny take on origins of the bomb and the birth of the Cold War's nuclear standoff - with lots of grim material though, such as the original films of the effects of nuclear weapons on Japanese people, i.e. the material that was left out of "Oppenheimer". Atomic Cafe is available online in full:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/i9xQTJ-kbUk" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/i9xQTJ-kbUk</a>
Beria was not only a bolshevik mass murderer and torturer of the common kind. According to the memoirs of Khrushchev, Beria was also a serial killer. He would haunt the Moscow streets in his car at night, having his body guard pick up any girl he fancied. Those women would be taken to his house, where he'd drug them, rape them and sometimes kill them. Many times very young girls. The body guards would then be tasked with burying the corpses in his yard. Afterwards the bodyguard gave a list of more than a hundred women who had been raped by Beria.<p>This man almost became the Soviet leader after Stalin's death, but was outmanoeuvred and later executed. According to Khrushchev, even Stalin feared Beria at times.<p>From Khrushchev:<p>"When Rudenko began the interrogation of Beria, a monstrous person was revealed before our eyes, a dreadful beast for whom nothing was sacred."
Wellerstein prides himself on being able to read Russian, but he is not as good at it as he thinks. Specifically, translating the title of the section "Атомные байки" as "Atomic fun" is simply inadequate. Here <<a href="https://en.pons.com/translate/russian-english/%D0%B1%D0%B0%CC%81%D0%B9%D0%BA%D0%B0?q=%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BA%D0%B0" rel="nofollow">https://en.pons.com/translate/russian-english/%D0%B1%D0%B0%C...</a>>, for instance, the second word is correctly translated as "fairy-tale, fable, old wives' tale".<p>So to sum up, his whole blog post is based on mistranslation
With respect to the XKCD cartoon, I am sure it killed all cancer cells within a certain radius of the blast, and it was thus a success. It turns out hydrogen bombs have even a bigger cancer cell killing radius than atomic bombs.
> The problem is, of course, that such levity gets undercut<p>I don't think that's true. That is, I'm sure it's true for the author of this article, but it's not true for the people involved. Humor has always thrived in dark times and places. What is viewed as grim and humorless from the outside is often not seen that way from within, else the grimness itself is what creates the response of humor. Is the idea that Soviet nuclear researchers should have spent their lives in morose silence because their facilities were built with gulag labor? It would be one thing for a click-bait writer with no understanding of history to take this position, but being a historian, I'm surprised the author of this excellent website does.
> Or maybe it’s part of the “Stalin wasn’t so bad” nationalist revisionism that has been building in Putin’s 21st-century Russian Federation.<p>I think it is worth pointing out that Stalin and Beria were actually Georgian, not Russian. Additionally, the architect of what was later known as the KGB was a Pole, Felix Dzerzhinsky.<p>Here is an interesting excerpt from the Dzerzhinsky entry in Wikipedia about an exchange with Lenin (who was actually Russian) on the question of Soviet policy on nationalities,<p><pre><code> April 1917 Party Conference, when Lenin accused Dzerzhinsky of Great-Russian chauvinism, he replied: "I can reproach him (Lenin) with standing at the point of view of the Polish, Ukrainian and other chauvinists."
</code></pre>
Today Putin often says that Vladimir Lenin is responsible for giving national minorities the freedoms they continue to enjoy today (some in form of independent statehood). He says this in a negative tone, and often equates it to placing a nuclear bomb under Russia.<p>My reason for pointing this out is that Soviet history is really peculiar and one has to be careful with saying Soviet = Russian.
> Or maybe it’s part of the “Stalin wasn’t so bad” nationalist revisionism that has been building in Putin’s 21st-century Russian Federation.<p>Putin himself seems to deplore Stalin; I think partly because it was Stalin that made Ukraine a soviet republic distinct from Russia. It's quite odd; Putin seems to be the most Stalin-like leader Russia has had since - well, Stalin. I have no way of knowing what ordinary Russians think of Stalin; I've not seen a Levada Centre poll on the question.