Originally published at: Top Russian shipyard boss "suddenly" dies "tragically" | Boing Boing
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haha! first thing i thought of reading that! “are the subs as ugly as the cars?”
super soviet engineering at its finest!
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This story is as funny as a screen door on a submarine.
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Hey, come look out of this window. It has a killer view.
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Did he fall out of a window? (In a submarine?)
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I wonder what Vlad’s Advent calendar looks like? (Julian calendar where Christmas falls January 7ish.)
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The jokes really write themselves, don’t they.
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In Quebec, the rumour (probably spread by Lada) was that Soviet factories were unable to make thin sheets of metal, and so the Lada’s panels were thick slabs of steel, resistant to rust.
Quebec’s salty roads ate them quickly.
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IIRC Zastava (Yugo) made their body panels thicker than in the original Fiat designs, to compensate for the cheap low-grade steel that Yugoslavia imported from the Soviet Union.
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Throwing people who have displeased the state out of windows seems to be a European thing. It kills them, but sends a distinct warning. It’s like the old New Orleans custom of throwing someone killed for not paying a gambling debt through a glass window or door.
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The Russian Ministry of Defenestration is really putting in the overtime this year.
I’m honestly surprised that Putin has made it this far. I figured one of his disgruntled oligarchs would find a way to express his displeasure with the war’s interference with their personal wealth.
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What puzzles me a bit is the sheer volume of tragic accidents, including a lot of relatively long-serving and not obviously politically pivotal, like this guy or the downright old aerospace R&D fellow from a little while back.
Is Great Leader, Gatherer of Russian Lands, just reacting badly to the revelation that everything he thought he knew about two decades of Russian military modernization was learned more from Potemkin than anyone else? A retroactive adjustment in the amount of skimming that’s an accepted prerogative of office that has reclassified a bunch of respectable sorts doing well by doing good as state enemies? Are many of them not actually coming from the top and, instead, are related to the assorted factions that now have good reason to believe that jockeying for power could get real interesting in the near future?
Killing political enemies, or holders of decent sized fortunes who refused to kiss the pinkie ring is old news at this point; but someone like a submarine designer seems like the sort who you either fire(if they don’t matter) or laterally promote somewhere(if they do, like Rogozin) if you don’t like their work; not someone you leave in place for years and years and then kill all of a sudden. That seems like a really unhelpful combination of leaving poor quality people in important positions for dangerously long periods of time and giving more or less diligent and competent functionaries the impression that they might get murdered, just because, after years of positive performance reviews.
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Fell out of a porthole, drowned.
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“A talented leader, a master in his field, a lifelong shipbuilder, a true Russian, very aerodynamic.”
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Someone said recently that murdering people who are in the way is quite normal in Russia. Most “oligarchs” and apparatchiks who fall down the stairs or out of the window are not important enough to be killed on Putin’s orders or as part of some power struggle between government factions. They just got on the wrong side of somebody who can have people he doesn’t like whacked.
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