" he was apparently good at managing the program."
That's one thing a lot of people don't understand. A lot of these monsters aren't just monsters but they are also very capable. Beria was a good manager, so was Himmler who led the Nazi SS. Stalin also was a hard worker and a master bureaucrat.
The same goes for today's leaders of organised crime, you have be CEO-material in order to manage 'Ndrangheta's ~50 billion euros business [1], it's not enough just to be able to kill some guys on a dark street in Catanzaro anymore.
Here is a insightful blog post from Erik Bernhardsson on Business secrets from terrible people[1] where he writes about management lessons from the Taliban, Theranos, Al-Qaeda and The Black Kings a crack-dealing gang in Chicago.
And here is an interesting article from the Economist on management lessons from Mexico’s drug lords[2]
They built and ran billion dollar international organizations that employed thousands of people and managed to not get killed or arrested for a long time. That's not an east thing to do in my book
You are underestimating how effective a "management" technique is demonstrating that you can shoot underperforming minions.
A lot of that "management" was simply terrorizing people to do your bidding.
So, no, he most likely wasn't a good manager the same way a bank robber isn't showing "good interpersonal skills" because he was able to convince all patrons to sit by the wall and employees to open the vault.
This is true, but only partly. Say, copious killings did not help the Big Jump in China, or the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, to achieve any impressive breakthroughs.
You are underestimating how effective a "management" technique is demonstrating that you can shoot underperforming minions.
I am somewhat skeptical of this take. I think if heaping abuse and threats of worse on people worked magic, there would be no homeless people in the US.
Threats only work if the capacity is there -- or almost there -- and it's feasible to extract X with sufficient pressure. But you still can't get blood from a turnip.
The threat must be legible and have a credible threat of authoritative judgment so steps can be taken to predictably avoid the consequence. It's not at all clear to a homeless person what steps they should take to reduce suffering in their life. (I'm aware I'm replying to a homeless or formerly homeless person. And it needn't be said, but I'm not saying that an effective threat is moral.)
Or the steps to reduce suffering are clear to them. You just don't like the conclusion they drew and don't approve.
There is insufficient affordable housing in the US. We build apartments designed for a nuclear family and expect young single people to get roommates and split the rent and then you see questions on the internet about "How do I deal with this roommate from hell?" and we make horror movies about it like Single White Female and continue to not offer housing options suitable for living alone on a budget.
Since WW2, we've torn down about a million SROs. We now think of SROs as housing for homeless people when it used to be normal market rate housing for single people.
Some people are homeless because they left abusive situations. They decided "I would rather sleep outside than continue to put up with this."
But the narrative most people accept is that homeless people are all addicts and crazies and this somehow means it's a personal problem, they aren't trying hard enough, they would rather be high than in shelter.
Addiction is a hard problem to solve no matter your social class. We don't act like "Wealthy rock stars with a drug habit must be wealthy because they take so many drugs." but we conclude that there is a cause and effect relationship between drug use and homelessness.
It's basically prejudice talking.
People on the street tend to be square pegs who have trouble finding a slot that fits them. We've actively eliminated a lot of those oddly shaped slots and then act like "You just don't want to make your life work."
Homeless people aren't necessarily any more or less virtuous or hard working or whatever than anyone else. The fabric of their life came unraveled and they don't know how to readily weave it back together and then the world tells them "The beatings shall continue until morale improves."
Yes, I agree with all that. Not sure where your second sentence is coming from. I was only responding to the idea that there is only one kind of way to threaten someone, that is ineffective.
If police starting executing 10 random homeless people every night, it wouldn't necessarily "solve" homelessness but the homeless would get very creative, very quickly to figure out how to not be where-ever the police were looking.
As with any management technique, it's about making sure you're focusing people on the right efforts, for values of "right" in terms of getting what you want. A horrifying police state has many examples both more and less efficient than Stalin and Beria, particularly if you take a view of the modern world through the lens of competitive authoritarianism.
Was it purely luck that they happened to pick good candidates to run specific programs whereas say, Mao did not? Could be, but to pick another example, I'd wager that few people would argue against the notion that Fidel Castro did more, with less resources, and less terror, than Stalin in relative terms.
But back to the homeless situation in the US, it's more than major political groups have no interest in solving the problem and that creeps into institutional policy in insidious ways, as opposed to whether or not harsh methods might have any positive results (ignoring the whole awfulness part). Malignant neglect is perhaps worse than active malice.
If police starting executing 10 random homeless people every night, it wouldn't necessarily "solve" homelessness...
That would rapidly cut back on the obviously, highly homeless population. Over the course of a year, that would be 3650 fewer homeless in the area.
When I was homeless in San Diego, there was an estimated 10k homeless on the streets of that city. Such a policy would tentatively eliminate the population of street homeless in just three years.
(Couch surfing is another form of homelessness but it is less obvious than people out in the street. Also some homeless float from cheap hotel to cheap hotel, being bled for more money each month than rent would cost but unable to arrange permanent housing.)
In the meantime, lines at homeless services would get shorter. This would leave more resources to go around for the remaining homeless, making it easier for them to solve their problems.
It would be draconian and have other effects, like normalizing the idea that police can play Judge Dredd and be judge, jury and executioner -- at least if you commit the crime of being very poor. Personally I would rather see us resolve the dire shortage of affordable housing that is a known root cause of homelessness in the US.
My point being: If that policy were instituted and the homeless suddenly began getting their act together, it wouldn't be solely due to people being "more motivated" by fear. It would in part be because of reduced burden on limited resources for solving the problem in question.
It might also be because fear of execution would free people up to try things that are currently "unthinkable." It would cut through their own internal red tape concerning "acceptable" behavior and likely also have other people looking the other way because "Well, hell, I would do that too in order to avoid being executed for the crime of being poor."
It might also make people decide they strongly disapprove of this outcome and make them more likely to donate to homeless services or volunteer, thereby adding more resources to the system to solve the problem.
Having written the above, it makes me wonder if these monsters were effective in part because they were operating in a low resource environment and reducing the burden on the available resources helped the remaining people be better fed and more effective and/or helped people decide they didn't care about looking foolish or breaking some social taboo. They cared about not being shot.
Of course, it's politically incorrect to analyze it and then say that's what happened and thereby "justify" their abhorrent actions. So people say they were monsters and say that we just don't understand why anyone put up with them.
Ideally, in a humane environment, we find ways to think outside the box without having to shoot people to make that socially acceptable.
It's pretty senseless too. The monsters were ineffective at everything but maintaining their own power. The Soviet Union was an economic, social, and political disaster that collapsed. It's a bizarre example to look to, like basing your agriculture on Soviet farming practices.
It's so trendy to embrace hate and cruelty as if it's just unavoidable realism, but it's really just reactionary rhetoric designed to undermine everyone to the left of the far right (i.e., anyone with any compassion or decency). We need to stop playing games with hatred and stand up for - and 'analyze' - something better, something positive that will get done something good.
> Ideally, in a humane environment, we find ways to think outside the box without having to shoot people to make that socially acceptable.
Nope. Daniel Ortega and Nicolas Maduro, in their countries in Latin America, today, can put any one in prison within hours for no reason besides a capture order. And they can do it in bulk. They can kill, but they don't need to. Not high profile victims, at least.
Their countries are and will remain poor because they are idiots beyond what is necessary to stay in power. They aren't good administrators.
I would also say not to underestimate the effort required to be in the position where you are making the threats rather than on the receiving end. A rise to that position also includes effectively managing your rivals into oblivion.
I am willing to agree. That is one of the reasons I sometimes feel people do not treat Putin seriously enough. The guy rose through ranks of US equivalent of CIA. You do not get there purely by luck. You do need skills including management.
I would rate Putin as extremely intelligent. What he has achieved is pretty impressive and he has held his position for a very long time. . You don’t have to like him but you have to accept that he is very good at what he does.
Is he though? Yeah he is definitely intelligent and surely ruthless. However: there is a reason he’s still in power. There is no one, in the world, to be able to guarantee his and his family’s safety once he leaves power. At the moment he’s all-powerful, but wouldn’t you rather have the option to retire?
> You are underestimating how effective a "management" technique is demonstrating that you can shoot underperforming minions.
> A lot of that "management" was simply terrorizing people to do your bidding.
As others are pointing out, but spelled differently: there's a difference between having people do what you want, and becoming successful. Many CEOs are able to get the workers do whatever, and the company will fail exactly because of that. It takes skill and knowledge to know where to lead.
No, this is demonstrably false by contrasting this with all the many (most?) totalitarian "managers" who had the same abilities to terrorize people but were rather ineffective despite that. There can be an obvious difference between the personal abilities of two people in a similar role, even if that role is evil.
I couldn't find any hard research on this but the sentiment seems to be that stack ranking at Microsoft was part of their stagnation before their revitalisation by the new CEO
> You are underestimating how effective a "management" technique is demonstrating that you can shoot underperforming minions.
It's not a great regular management technique, but its a great image management technique in the narrow sense that it effectively leverages survivorship bias (for both individuals and records) to favor the future positive perception of your management technique.
Developing and motivating people is just 1 aspect of a manager’s role, there are many other hats like project manager, vision, drive incentivising
Arguably not many managers have it
I have no idea if those people were great manager or great despots there maybe a relation with how hard working they were
The smart and competent know this, and put on a persona, like Bush II's drawl or Boris Johnson, who intentionally ruffles his hair - as that is the image he wants to project.
That's what the Germans thought until the Nazis started working the system. I bet if Trump had been a little smarter, sometimes kept his mouth shut and not kicked people around all the time, he may have got away with much more.
That’s what I am thinking. It doesn’t even have to be MAGA only. I bet wokeness could also turn into a dictatorship with the right leader. That’s why rohe current US political climate where people think that the other side is evil and can’t be negotiated with is so dangerous. The right leader can make a case that there is a dangerous crisis and that laws have to be suspended to deal with the threat and voila you have a dictatorship that’s supported by half the population.
That's why I'm pre-committing against the death penalty. Even murderers shouldn't be killed by the state. [1] I invite anyone on the right to join me in this stance - It puts a cap on how bad the consequences for our political positions can get.
[1] There's a bunch of edge cases for self-defense and how to apprehend people. I don't have the time to get into these. Most people know what I mean by "Abolish the death penalty".
Please let's not "both sides" this. It's the maga crowd who have fallen into a cult of personality and are excusing those personalities for their incompetence and its results. Until that appears from another vector it is dishonest and misleading to project this on any other group.
That is routine for US politics; partisans always forgive their team for incompetence and its results. I think only catastrophes as egregious as Afghanistan (all the way through from Bush to Biden) have managed to pierce the partisan distortion field.
> I bet wokeness could also turn into a dictatorship with the right leader.
What is that based on? The progressive left heavily supports the democratic process, they don't try to prevent anyone from voting, they haven't elected anyone who advocates that. They also control no state or national executive positions and no legislatures, while the GOP recently controlled the White House, regularly controls both houses of Congress, and controls many governorships and state legislatures - and openly use that power to prevent people from voting them out. In many states, the voters cannot choose who runs their legislatures.
Not much more than what is currently sanctioned by all the people who work in the government and aren't elected. You don't have to be maga to destroy a country, just the kind of small minded person who would think that it is possible to do so, and so out of fear of being called names, and the local Karen giving you the dirty eye at the hoa meetings, you would lie down and let the self ascribed "adults" take care of "it" for you, instead of thinking for yourself and questioning authority. ;)
Beria's daughter in law mused to Simon Sebag Montefiore, a recent Stalin biographer, in an interview that "Beria was the kind of man who, if he lived in the United States, might very well have become chairman of General Motors."
There is a really interesting take on Beria in what is possibly the best Stalin's biography ("Court of the Red Tzar"). Apparently, Beria saw himself a successor to Stalin who would put the country onto a milder course, and he was looking forward to redeeming himself in the face of history. There was something to the effect of him saying that his children would get educated at Oxford. And he did not mean it how current Russian elites do it (so that their seed can escape the country they have been destroying), but rather to highlight his appreciation for Western values / education / culture and willingness to learn from the recent WW2 allies and adapt their methods on USSR territory. The whole idea of "my children will study at Oxford" coming from someone like Beria was shocking.
Beria was by all means a horrible person. But Khruschev (or anybody else really that high up the Soviet totem pole) was as much of an executioner and a murderer. It's just that Khruschev has won and he got to make Beria a (justified) boogeyman. Now we know of Khruschev as just an inefficient manager who took off his shoe at UN and not as a person who called arresting 308 people a poor performance for 1936 Moscow or a person who orchestrated bloody repressions in Ukraine.
At the same time, although Beria's activities were pure terror during Stalin's rule, chances are, if Beria did come to power, he'd have been a better ruler than Kruschev from the humanistic perspective (less people would have been murdered and sent to camps, less errors made etc.). But that's a lot of "ifs".
It does sound wild (to me as well), but then there is evidence of USSR
party elites (e.g. Kaganovich) turning from maniacs and terrorists into peaceful bureaucrats overnight upon Stalin's death.
Beria's claims or promises are meaningless; that's a completely untrustworthy source. Beria was a homicidal maniac telling you that, if you give them power, they'll be 'milder'.
Lots of homicidal maniacs, and even plain old dictators, say the same. The next step, after they gain power, is to say that there is a new period of openness, and their critics are encouraged to speak out. This releases some pressure while the dictator consolidates control over the levers of power - it's not rule of law, so unlike an elected President, the levers don't just shift to the new person. And of course it helps that their critics identify themselves. You should know what happens next. (A popular early step is that enemies are arrested for 'corruption'.)
The nuance there is that Beria made those claims in private and did not want that to be known. At that moment he would score more political points presenting himself as a hardliner. It was something the author of that book found out almost by accident doing the research about his private life.
If not for the excellent quality of the other material in that book I would have not really paid much attention to what Beria had to say about his plans
> It does sound wild (to me as well), but then there is evidence of USSR party elites (e.g. Kaganovich) turning from maniacs and terrorists into peaceful bureaucrats overnight upon Stalin's death.
They were "murderous bureaucrats" for whom mass murder was a faceless statistics. They would not fret or get emotional about it neither before nor after the fact.
A glimpse of artistic rendition of how plain and "bureaucratic" a mass murder machine could be is a historic re-enactment movie "Conspiracy" [0] about Wannsee conference of 1942 (it is about Nazi Germany not USSR but the theme of "murderous bureaucracy" seems to be universal).
“It does sound wild (to me as well), but then there is evidence of USSR party elites (e.g. Kaganovich) turning from maniacs and terrorists into peaceful bureaucrats overnight upon Stalin's death.”
Same happened in Germany. Nazis turned practically overnight into exemplary democrats.
That's one thing a lot of people don't understand. A lot of these monsters aren't just monsters but they are also very capable. Beria was a good manager, so was Himmler who led the Nazi SS. Stalin also was a hard worker and a master bureaucrat.