Wow. The “Ryazan Miracle” incident is almost unbelievable. It’s hard for me to imagine one person making decisions that are so egregiously short-sighted, let alone a whole committee.
Larionov ordered almost all cattle to be slaughtered (‘the women, and the children too’ at that), and then promised more beef next year. What was going on in his mind? Was there so much pressure that he stopped caring whether he would even live that long? Did the incentives just bring forward the same kind of impulse that causes someone to steal half a paycheck’s worth of money from the register, rather than just coming into work and getting paid?
Even post-mortem he was not stripped of his title of Hero of Labour.
...Ah. Mostly depressingly, maybe Larionov was smart after all.
He was born on August 6, 1907, in the village of Gribanovskaya of the Onega Uyezd, Arkhangelsk Governorate (now the Onega District of Arkhangelsk Oblast), into a peasant family. From childhood he was engaged in agricultural labor. He graduated from a rural school. In 1925–1929 he held leadership positions in the Onega District Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (VLKSM). After serving in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, he worked in party positions. In 1938 he graduated from the historical-party department of the Leningrad Institute of Red Professors, after which he was assigned to Yaroslavl Oblast. Such appointments were encouraged in the USSR to give the impression that the bureaucracy was socially close to the people.
If one takes into account that rural schools of that time usually had only four grades, and that the Institute of Red Professors primarily instilled a communist worldview, he was essentially poorly educated, but an initiative and compliant executor.
He simply took too literally the phrase of the top political leader Nikita Khrushchev, “Catch up and overtake America,” regarding the production of steel, meat, and milk.
Although in the areas of launching the first human into space and producing atomic bombs, more educated people were likewise given unlimited initiative to catch up with and overtake the Americans—and they succeeded.
The Institute for training Red Professors is, of course, particularly impressive—but that is quite another story. They probably earned something like a Doctor of Marxist Philosophy there.
Wow. The “Ryazan Miracle” incident is almost unbelievable. It’s hard for me to imagine one person making decisions that are so egregiously short-sighted, let alone a whole committee.
Larionov ordered almost all cattle to be slaughtered (‘the women, and the children too’ at that), and then promised more beef next year. What was going on in his mind? Was there so much pressure that he stopped caring whether he would even live that long? Did the incentives just bring forward the same kind of impulse that causes someone to steal half a paycheck’s worth of money from the register, rather than just coming into work and getting paid?
...Ah. Mostly depressingly, maybe Larionov was smart after all.
He was born on August 6, 1907, in the village of Gribanovskaya of the Onega Uyezd, Arkhangelsk Governorate (now the Onega District of Arkhangelsk Oblast), into a peasant family. From childhood he was engaged in agricultural labor. He graduated from a rural school. In 1925–1929 he held leadership positions in the Onega District Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (VLKSM). After serving in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, he worked in party positions. In 1938 he graduated from the historical-party department of the Leningrad Institute of Red Professors, after which he was assigned to Yaroslavl Oblast. Such appointments were encouraged in the USSR to give the impression that the bureaucracy was socially close to the people.
If one takes into account that rural schools of that time usually had only four grades, and that the Institute of Red Professors primarily instilled a communist worldview, he was essentially poorly educated, but an initiative and compliant executor.
He simply took too literally the phrase of the top political leader Nikita Khrushchev, “Catch up and overtake America,” regarding the production of steel, meat, and milk.
Although in the areas of launching the first human into space and producing atomic bombs, more educated people were likewise given unlimited initiative to catch up with and overtake the Americans—and they succeeded.
The Institute for training Red Professors is, of course, particularly impressive—but that is quite another story. They probably earned something like a Doctor of Marxist Philosophy there.