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Comment by ufocia | Hacker News Reader

Yes, humor.

Well his Soviet escapades seem to suggest that not all of them were wholly humorous.

Can you be more specific? Which ones do you believe were serious?

I believe these refer to the pre-Soviet state of affairs when the yard keeper (дворник) of an apartment block was basically subordinate to the city police - at least in the capital of St. Petersburg.

That was probably the case also during the Soviet era. It may well be the case even today.

I believe that during the Soviet era, almost every position will be "on the guard" not just the yard keeper (as depicted in "The Diamond Arm" of 1968). After the Soviet era, yard-keeping services are way understaffed to be useful for that, and also mostly rely on immigrant labor lately. Still, you can never be sure.

I wasn't aware that Russia has immigrant labor, though I shouldn't have been surprised given their relative economic strength.

Some music video commentary on russian immigrant labour:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fix7P6aGXQ (Uzbek artist)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7pSztJFomE (Circassian artist)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ugivNRYfjc (Russian artist — for the taxi driving character introduced at 3:30)

these are all from about a decade back; there's no doubt been much more since...

Notes from the Underground Internets.

It is rather dark —an almost impenetrable night— in this crocodile, but at least it has USB-C charging and the 5G reception is excellent, so —thus far anyway— it hasn't affected my HN habit.

(I must admit I ♥ the MC Doni lyric: "إن شاء الله или c'est la vie". Anyone know of a lyrical line that beats it, either with four languages, or scripts written in three different directions [r-to-l, l-to-r, u-to-d?], etc?)

Tajikistan's embassy and consulates are situated in 5 out of 6 Western districts of Russia, guess why.

Russia has enough immigrant labor to fuel the existence of things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_Against_Illegal_Immig....

Only in dictatorships. We don't have informants in democracies. We have phones. /s

Reading this article and expecting him to be a prototypical anti-war writer only to see that he was at one point a COMMISSAR IN THE RED ARMY caused quite a bit of whiplash

Central Europe was the place of a lot of complex belligerence at the time. Given his penchant for humor, I'm not surprised that he was a commissar. 'The Bolshevik Party established political commissars in 1918 to control and improve morale in the military forces." For all I know it could've been for self-preservation.

I'm not trying to be an apologist for him. Rather, I'd like to encourage people to learn a bit more about him and his environment before jumping to conclusions based on a single point in his life.

Whoa. That surely discredits him.

"In 1911, he founded The Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law. He founded it with his friends in the Vinohrady pub called U zlatého litru (The Golden Liter) to parody the political life of that time."

He didn't become a Communist until about 1918.

The most you can say is that he had a complex life.

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