6 ms·
Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era
- arjie 3mo agoI 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. 0: both these are somewhere on archive.org e.g. https://archive.org/details/thelonghairedmaiden https://archive.org/details/thelonghairedmaiden
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- xp84 3mo agoThanks for sharing the link. The Long Haired Maiden was beautifully illustrated and i enjoyed the story.
- asxndu 3mo agoQuick question. What do soviets make great researchers? I noticed this pattern in ml, math & physics research. Is it that they have better quality books?
- ricardobayes 3mo agoLoosely related https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/06/why-so-many-top-hackers-hail-from-russia/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/06/why-so-many-top-hackers-...
- cyberax 3mo agoDescription 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.
- drysine 3mo ago>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?
- shikshake 3mo agoHackernews thrives on users confidently making claims based on their own limited perspective and providing next to no reasoning or evidence.
- cyberax 3mo agoI 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.
- drysine 3mo ago
- Exoristos 3mo agoAmericans 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.
- physicsguy 3mo agoThey had a thing of encouraging talent and putting it in special schools to develop it. Then Maths reading groups etc.
- nullorempty 3mo agoNot only that. Corporations are filled with excellent software developers from Russia who did not go to any specialized schools or graduated from prestigious universities.
- sirfz 3mo agoThey have a very strong DIY culture which I'm sure helps with making people explore and discover knowledge and develop skill
- vrganj 3mo agoI 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.
- galaxyLogic 3mo agoIt'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.
- selimthegrim 3mo agoIt's more like 4%
- jdw64 3mo ago[dead]
- kdmtctl 3mo agoMath 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.
- cyberax 3mo agoCompetition. 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.
- StefanBatory 3mo agoFor 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.
- cyberax 3mo agoOh, absolutely. Especially for the top universities. That made olympiads even more important because they allowed students to bypass the exams. And in the USSR, if you failed to get into the university, you were drafted into the army for 2 years.
- StefanBatory 3mo agoSame 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.
- FpUser 3mo agoThey would still nail you after university. For 1.5 years instead of 2.
- vlian2088 3mo agomostly because people had no option to leave the country. also the salaries of scientists and engineers were notoriously shitty, so only those with passion for the subject studied it.
- vhantz 3mo agoGood thing we've overcome that! Today, in the land of the free, researchers' passion is rewarded with good salaries and working conditions. Right?
- vlian2088 3mo agoI assure you that Soviets did not have the kind of ```science``` that is temporarily defunded in the US.
- throw-the-towel 3mo agoOh come on, Scientific Communism was even a separate discipline in universities.
- vlian2088 3mo agoyes, 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%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%84%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%82_%D0%B2_%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A0#%D0%9D%D0%B0%D0%B3%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B7%D0%BA%D0%B0 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.
- nullorempty 3mo agoRussians consider their profession a calling and try to be the best at it. Makes big difference when it's calling and not just-a-job. I dunno what attitude russia's gen-z holds towards profession but in my time it was definitely considered a calling.
- rramadass 2mo agoOne word, "Culture"; See the comment by "elzbardico" here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738277 Sadly, current-day global culture/society does not value knowledge if it is not in the furtherance of capitalistic goals.
- HelloUsername 3mo agoBetter link? https://archive.org/details/mir-titles https://archive.org/details/mir-titles
- freefaler 3mo agothanks for this link, it's a great find!
- the-mitr 3mo agoCurator/maintainer of Mir Titles here. 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.
- HelloUsername 3mo agoGood 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
- the-mitr 3mo agoWell, there is a template that we use for scheduling the posts, the link panel is a part of that. Idea is to reach out to many people.
- alok-g 3mo agoA discussion on this happened recently here*: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739003 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!
- lioeters 2mo agoOh right, I saw that comment too, and grabbed a bunch of interesting-looking books on mathematics. Glad the website got more attention, good stuff!
- rramadass 2mo agoYep, i have been recommending these books and this site for a while now. The reason? See my comment from 7 years ago! - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21351115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21351115 The younger generation in particular need to know of these excellent resources for Science/Mathematics. Another good publisher of old/classic Science/Mathematics books is "Dover Publications" - https://store.doverpublications.com/ https://store.doverpublications.com/ Checkout for example, the books by Richard Hamming, in particular; "Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics" - https://store.doverpublications.com/products/9780486439457 https://store.doverpublications.com/products/9780486439457 (highly relevant to today's needs). Also checkout the book series (mathematics via correspondence for high-school students) by I.M.Gelfand - https://store.doverpublications.com/search?type=product&q=I.M.Gelfand https://store.doverpublications.com/search?type=product&q=I....
- blackoil 3mo agoI 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.
- wolfi1 3mo agoI, 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
- zem 3mo agoi have very fond memories of mir books from my childhood, especially yakov perelman's outstanding maths and science for fun books.
- blackoil 3mo agoAnyone 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.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 3mo agoThere are private efforts in Russia, but mostly they digitize Soviet-time books written in Russian or maybe in other languages spoken in Russia. (As far as I know, that is; I am, of course, not aware of the whole field.) Mir published in Russian too, but here it mostly printed translated works, a lot of scientifical and technical literature, a foreign sci-fi series and such. It was like a two-way enterprise, connecting USSR to the world. Officially all this does not seem to be supported in any way, I'm afraid.
- rramadass 2mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21351115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21351115
- fmajid 3mo agoThey 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).
- kumarvvr 3mo agoI 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
- zkmon 3mo agoMy 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.
- bawis 3mo agoWere they translated to Hindi or kept in their original language?
- zkmon 3mo agoEnglish
- the-mitr 3mo agoHere is the book, https://archive.org/download/domination-in-2-545-endgame-studies-by-ghenrikh-m.-kasparyan-z-lib.org_202202/Domination%20in%202%2C545%20Endgame%20Studies%20by%20Ghenrikh%20M.%20Kasparyan.pdf https://archive.org/download/domination-in-2-545-endgame-stu... Maintainer/curator of Mir Titles here.
- zkmon 3mo agoThat's very nice. Thank you!
- hiyer 3mo agoWe 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!
- smath 3mo agoVery 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] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Yk1mz23YFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Yk1mz23YFA
- bebe9494i4 3mo ago[flagged]
- ivan_gammel 3mo agoNo. 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_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_Soviet_Un...
- jhbadger 3mo agoThey 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).
- yantrams 3mo agoWhile 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.
- the-mitr 3mo agoMaintainer/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!
- para_parolu 2mo agoHi! Is it possible to grab all these books as one bundle? I want to keep them locally for preservation and my kids when they grow up
- the-mitr 2mo agoYou can download the entire collection via our Internet Archive collection. You can use the export option from advanced search and keep mir-titles as the collection, then use wget or curl to download all of them.
- JKCalhoun 3mo agoVery 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.)
- the-mitr 3mo agoMagazines 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).
- jeswin 3mo agoMisha 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.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- stefanjpm 3mo agoAnyone 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.
- shash 3mo agoThese 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 Explosion by O.M.Olgin: https://archive.org/details/ExperimentsWithoutExplosions https://archive.org/details/ExperimentsWithoutExplosions The title, as well as the content...
- arjie 3mo ago> 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_Soviet_Union_-_The_Baltic_Republics_-_Cover.webp 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_Soviet_Union_-_The_Ukraine,_Byelorussia,_and_Moldavia_-_Cover.webp https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Folk_Tales_From_The_Sov... and https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Folk_Tales_From_The_Soviet_Union_-_Central_Asia_and_Kazakhstan_-_Cover.webp 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.
- iamshs 3mo agoSoviet books were a boon to the world. I thank Soviet scientists. https://valeman.medium.com/the-men-who-translated-the-machine-wu-zuji-qiu-guangming-and-the-hidden-builders-of-chinas-68a49f53e0b1 https://valeman.medium.com/the-men-who-translated-the-machin...
- rramadass 2mo agoThat is a pretty good and meaningful article. It was the same with many other countries, whether English or Native languages.
- hliyan 3mo agoWe 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.
- rramadass 2mo agohttps://mirtitles.org/?s=Yakov+Perelman https://mirtitles.org/?s=Yakov+Perelman All of Perelman's books are a must read, particularly by students. Few books can better motivate you in Science/Mathematics.
- rbanffy 3mo agoI wish this kind of soft diplomacy was more common today. It’s a lot cheaper than bombing schools.
- actionfromafar 3mo agoWell there's your problem. You can't grift the stock markets over a weekend with a shipment of books.
- nullorempty 3mo agoSince we are on the topic of russian literature I'd definitely recommend reading something other than the usual suspects Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. 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.
- nullorempty 3mo agoSome 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 ...
- FpUser 3mo ago>"Dostoevsky and Tolstoy" 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
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- AFF87 2mo agoHighly recommend this is you ever need to study differential equations (I guess there may be still a reason for it?). Only thing that helped me pass the class https://archive.org/details/m.-l.-krasnov-a.-i.-kiselyov-g.-l-makarenko-a-book-of-problems-in-ordinary-diffe/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/m.-l.-krasnov-a.-i.-kiselyov-g.-...
- selimthegrim 2mo agoI taught out of this book at Tulane and while it is a good problem book, some of the concept transitions don't flow well and you need another book or to write some supplementary notes. Also the section on Jacobians is pretty clearly lifted straight out of Pontryagin's book
- raphlinus 2mo agoI had a lot of these books as a kid. I'm not even 100% why, but my dad glommed on to the idea that they were of high quality, and also quite inexpensive. Probably my favorite was "Higher Mathematics for Beginners" by Yakov Zeldovich[1]. I was a voracious reader, and largely taught myself calculus from it. Another one on probability and statistics I also found quite accessible (can't find it immediately). There were some other sketchier pop-sci books, I remember one that had the "water has structural memory" theory in it. But likely those didn't do any lasting damage. [1]: https://mirtitles.org/2022/07/04/higher-mathematics-for-beginners-and-its-application-to-physics-zeldovich/ https://mirtitles.org/2022/07/04/higher-mathematics-for-begi...
- rramadass 2mo agoFYI - There is a later version of the above book titled "Higher Math for Beginners" (with Yaglom) and "Elements of Applied Mathematics" (with Myskis) - https://mirtitles.org/?s=zeldovich https://mirtitles.org/?s=zeldovich Hard copy versions are available from Aargon Press on Amazon India.