Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era (mirtitles.org)

I 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

Quick question.

What do soviets make great researchers? I noticed this pattern in ml, math & physics research.

Is it that they have better quality books?

Better link? https://archive.org/details/mir-titles

A discussion on this happened recently here*:

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!

I 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.

i have very fond memories of mir books from my childhood, especially yakov perelman's outstanding maths and science for fun books.

Anyone 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.

They 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).

My 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.

We 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!

I 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

Very 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

Maintainer/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!

Anyone 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.

These 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 The title, as well as the content...

Soviet books were a boon to the world. I thank Soviet scientists.

https://valeman.medium.com/the-men-who-translated-the-machin...

We 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.

I wish this kind of soft diplomacy was more common today.

It’s a lot cheaper than bombing schools.

Since 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.

Highly 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.-...

I 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-begi...