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...
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.
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 ...
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.
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).
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]
While that maybe true ( I know some folks who are reprinting them ), the translated editions from those days were all printed in USSR at Mir / Raduga / Progress presses itself. We've even had poets, writers and other luminaries from India visit Moscow for this and other things as part of cultural initiatives.
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.
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).
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
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!
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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
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
I think Soviet union never joined global copyright groups, so Russian books were fair game for translation, basically copyleft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_Soviet_Un...
Glad to see this on the front page on HN, we had a similar bump some years back!
(Love to also see a collection of Soviet Life magazine. What's out there, that I have been able to find, is pretty slim.)
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!
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.
Books like Problems In physics by I E Irodov were my favourites
It’s a lot cheaper than bombing schools.
What do soviets make great researchers? I noticed this pattern in ml, math & physics research.
Is it that they have better quality books?
I dunno what attitude russia's gen-z holds towards profession but in my time it was definitely considered a calling.
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.
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.
And in the USSR, if you failed to get into the university, you were drafted into the army for 2 years.
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.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/06/why-so-many-top-hackers-...
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.
How do you people come up with such stories?
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.
also the salaries of scientists and engineers were notoriously shitty, so only those with passion for the subject studied it.
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.
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.
https://valeman.medium.com/the-men-who-translated-the-machin...