Soviet
Article
Soviet is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between January 29, 2021 and October 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Soviet farming”; “even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass”; “Soviet soldiers would - I can’t believe I’m writing this - take it to keep warm”. It most often appears alongside Europe, Twitter, Continental philosophy.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 7
- Issue count: 7
- First seen: January 29, 2021
- Last seen: October 24, 2025
Appears In
- Contra Weyl On Technocracy
- Book Review: The Cult Of Smart
- Shilling For Big Mitochondria
- Your Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning
- Book Review: Elon Musk
- Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
- Highlights From The Comments On Fatima
Related Pages
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- Europe (3 shared issues)
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- Twitter (3 shared issues)
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- Continental philosophy (2 shared issues)
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- Donald Trump (2 shared issues)
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- Eliezer Yudkowsky (2 shared issues)
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- FDA (2 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
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- Jesus (2 shared issues)
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- New Orleans (2 shared issues)
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- Scott (2 shared issues)
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- Silicon Valley (2 shared issues)
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- Trump (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I like Seeing Like A State as much as anyone else (though see the caveats in Part VII of my review for some criticisms). But it worries me that everyone analyzes the exact same three examples of the failures of top-down planning: Soviet collective farms, Brasilia, and Robert Moses. I’d like to propose some other case studies:
Inline links: my review
But if you accept that "technocracy" describes things other than Soviet farming, Brasilia, and Robert Moses, the trick stops working. You notice a lot of things you could describe using the same vocabulary were good decisions that went well. Then you have to ask yourself: is Seeing Like A State the definitive proof that technocratic schemes never work? Or is it a compendium of rare man-bites-dog style cases, interesting precisely because of how unusual they are?
Did you notice none of Weyl's examples of technocracy fit this definition at all? Robert Moses had zero formal training in urban planning or anything related to city-building. The Soviet leadership wasn't "meritocratically chosen". And Oscar Niemeyer didn't construct a High Modernist planned village and a control village, test which one performed better on various metrics, and scale the winner up into Brasilia.
He argues that every word of it is a lie. American education isn't getting worse by absolute standards: students match or outperform their peers from 20 or 50 years ago. It's not getting worse by international standards: America's PISA rankings are mediocre, but the country has always scored near the bottom of international rankings, even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass and landing men on the moon. Race and gender gaps are stable or decreasing. American education is doing much as it's always done - about as well as possible, given the crushing poverty, single parent-families, violence, and racism holding back the kids it's charged with shepherding to adulthood.
So after 1938, US dieters stopped using 2,4-dinitrophenol. It next shows up in history books on the Eastern Front of World War 2, where Soviet soldiers would - I can’t believe I’m writing this - take it to keep warm. There’s something quintessentially Russian about this, like a cross between the Platonic essences of AK-47s and Krokodil. Still, World War 2 ended and poor DNP vanished from the history books again.
Inline links: take it to keep warm
I see Charon and Weinert’s story, the Guillaume du Vintrais’ story, as a positive validation of Frankl’s theories. And yes, we may remember that “no man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny”, and indeed, their destiny was unique and poetic. But the Soviet Union gave us so much “experimental” material to base on, that there are bound to be similarities between theirs and thousands of others.
The real Guillaume du Vintrais was born in 1943 in a Soviet Gulag. He was conjured up by two people, Yakov Charon and Yuri Weinert. They met in a forced labor camp with an ironic name “Free”, where they were spending ten years each for “counter-revolutionary activity”, a term as loose as it sounds. Charon studied in the Berlin Conservatory, worked as a sound technician in the soviet film industry, spoke perfect German. Weinert played piano since he was a kid, wrote poetry, worked as a translator from French. In 1937 both of them were arrested and sent to the “Free” labor camp. They were the same age, they had the same interests. Naturally, they became friends.
The first “edition” of the “Wicked Songs”, containing forty sonnets, was hand-written by Yuri on the thinnest tracing paper in five copies and sent to their friends and relatives. This type of “package” by itself could be a reason for an arrest; luckily some of their contacts were brave and decent people. They distributed the sonnets through a “pigeon network”, in secret. One of the people who read them this way was young Stella Kopytnaya. Some years later, after meeting him in person, she married Yakov Charon. They named their first child Yuri. In 1954 Yakov was “rehabilitated”, a soviet judicial term meaning that the state made a mistake ever arresting him in the first place. He died in 1972 from tuberculosis that he got in the camp. (On the two side-by-side photos he is on the right)
How does he know so much? Partly through reading; he famously read lots of rocketry textbooks before starting SpaceX, including old Soviet manuals nobody else had heard of. But also:
Girard’s starting point is the similarity between Bible stories and pagan myths. You’ve heard about this before - dying-and-resurrecting gods, that sort of thing. You might expect Girard, a good Catholic, to reject these similarities. He doesn’t. He says they’re real and important. Pagan myths resemble the Bible because they’re both describing the same psychosocial process. The myths are distorted propaganda supporting the process, and the Bible is a clear-eyed description of the process which reveals it to be evil. Just as worshipful Soviet hagiographies of Stalin and sober historical analyses of Stalin will have many similarities (since they’re both describing Stalin), so there will be unavoidable resonances between myth and the Bible.
While it was still unclear how the leading clerics or Ayatollah Khomeini himself would react to this event, it was not only being celebrated by local clerics in thousands of mosques, but also secularists and communist activists, who were keen to confirm the Ayatollah’s appearance in the moon. As a matter of fact, even the Soviet-sponsored journal of the communist Tūdeh-Party “Navīd” wrote: “Our toiling masses, fighting against world-devouring Imperialism headed by the blood-sucking United States, have seen the face of their beloved Imam and leader, Khomeini the Breaker of Idols, in the moon. A few pipsqueaks cannot deny what a whole nation has seen with its own eyes.”