Danger Flags #2: Overlooking

WHY YOU HAVE LOADED GUN IN BRIEFCASE?

It is the 15th of October 1934. 
A somewhat chubby, shabbily dressed, somewhat stupid-looking man is entering the lobby of the Smolny Institute in Leningrad.
 
The first security guard, behind his desk, is reading a newspaper. He glances up, makes eye contact with the chubby shabby man, and goes back to the newspaper.
 
As the chubby man is about to enter into the office areas of the institute, a younger and more vigilant security guard gets a bad feeling.
 
“Hey, you! Stop!”
 
Chubby man freezes on the spot.
 
“The briefcase, let me see!”
 
And the chubby man sighs and hands it over, feeling helpless and defeated.
 
The guard walks over to a table, sets it down, opens it up to look and inside, and – what the hell?
 
“Hey, backup!” he yells to the other guard.
 
He turns to the chubby man:
 
“Don’t move! What the hell you do?”
 
Inside the chubby man’s briefcase is a loaded Nagant M1895 revolver.
 
They arrest and detain the chubby man.
 
***
 
PHONE CALLS
 
Yagoda gets the phonecall in Moscow.
 
The man was arrested.
 
Damn.
 
He works the phone rapidly, calls his people in Leningrad.
 
***
 
OKAY, YOU IDIOT, GET OUT OF HERE
 
The chubby shabby man had been sweating, in a state of nervous panic, when the guards come back.
 
“You are idiot, don’t do again. Get out of here.”
 
He doesn’t believe his ears.
 
As he’s released from custody, he’s walking unsteadily to leave the building when a different guard at the front desk calls out at him.
 
“Hey, you, your briefcase is there” says the guard, and waves dismissively.
 
The chubby man feels alarmed, but picks up the briefcase and walks outside before daring to check. Then, trying to act casual as he peers into the briefcase, the chubby man’s eyes widen.
 
The gun is still inside.
 
And still loaded.
 
Over the next two months, the majority of security guards at the Smolny Institute would be transferred away, leaving only a skeleton crew of security at the most important government office in Leningrad.
 
Two and a half months later, on 1 December, the chubby man re-enters the building. This time, there are no guards at all at the entrance.
 
He makes his way to the third floor and meanders until he sees Leningrad’s First Secretary, Sergei Kirov, emerge into the hallway.
 
The chubby man shadows a pace behind Kirov, opens the briefcase quietly and withdraws the gun, and shoots Kirov in the back of the neck before fleeing down the stairs.
 
***
 
THE ROUNDUP

Genrikh Yagoda had been picked by Stalin in July 1934 as People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, a role that meant overseeing the regular police and the NKVD, the secret police and intelligence service.
 
Right away, Yagoda was set to some grim work – dealing with Sergei Kirov.
 
Kirov was seen by Stalin as one of his largest potential rivals. Earlier in 1934, when there were elections for the Central Committee at the Communist Party Congress, Kirov received only three votes against him among the entire delegation of over a thousand, overwhelmingly the most popular person there. Stalin received somewhere between 100 and 300 votes against, though the exact number was covered up.
 
While the exact details aren’t quite precise for obvious reasons – conspiracies are often poorly documented – we know that the chubby and mentally unstable assassin had been both directly and indirectly assisted by Yagoda’s NKVD under Stalin’s instructions.
 
In the aftermath of Kirov’s assassination, a number of his friends and confidants were quickly killed as well. Kirov’s close friend and personal bodyguard, Commissar Borisov, died when he “fell from a truck” the very next day after being arrested by Yagoda’s NKVD agents.
 
The first announcements of who killed Kirov were attributed to a “fascist plot” of “foreign reactionaries” and it was claimed that the assassin had been armed by a “foreign embassy or consulate” – but this line of thinking was soon discarded; Stalin saw a bigger opportunity at hand.
 
Stalin tasked Yagoda, then, with fabricating and contriving evidence against a number of other prominent potential rivals that undoubtedly had nothing to do with Kirov’s death. The Old Bolsheviks Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenav were quickly arrested, interrogated, and tortured by Yagoda and his agents to extract confessions.
 
These would be used in the Moscow Show Trials, as part of Stalin’s Purges.
 
Wikipedia: Lev Kamenev  –
 
“The men were tried in January 1935 and were forced to admit "moral complicity" in Kirov's assassination. Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years in prison and Kamenev to five. [...] In August 1936, after months of careful preparations and rehearsals in [Yagoda’s] Soviet secret police prisons, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 others, mostly Old Bolsheviks, were put on trial again. This time the charges including forming a terrorist organization that allegedly killed Kirov and tried to kill Stalin and other leaders of the Soviet government. ”
 
Wikipedia: Grigory Zinoviev  –
 
“Before the trial, Zinoviev and Kamenev had agreed to plead guilty to the false charges on the condition that they not be executed, a condition that Stalin accepted, stating: "that goes without saying". Nonetheless, a few hours after their conviction, Stalin ordered their execution that night. Shortly after midnight, on the morning of August 25, Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed by shooting. ”
 
***
 
AND SO IT GOES FOR YAGODA
 
Genrikh Yagoda was very aware of all of this macabre work – it was his agents planning and outputting all the various harshness, extracting confessions and torture, fabricating evidence.
 
He, too, knew of the false promises being made to people who would confess. They would be told they wouldn’t be executed and their families wouldn’t be harmed if they confessed.
 
Inevitably, both would be false. The confessed and convicted men would be executed, and all too often, so would their spouses and children and close friends.
 
Yagoda no doubt knew that Zinoviev and Kamenev were innocent; indeed, some of the charges they confessed to were outright absurd.
 
All of these men killed directly (via assassination) or indirectly (via fabricated evidence, show trial, and execution) were not guilty of the things they actually confessed to, but rather were seen as dangerous rivals to Stalin’s power.
 
You would think, thus, that Yagoda would have gotten wary and cautious at some point, no?
 
And yet, he seemed to be utterly surprised at his own arrest and being placed on trial.
 
Wikipedia: Grinrikh Yagoda: Arrest, Trial, and Execution  –
 
“In March 1937, Yagoda was arrested on Stalin's orders. Yezhov announced Yagoda's arrest for diamond smuggling, corruption, and spying for Germany since joining the party in 1917. Yezhov even sprinkled mercury around his office, then blamed it on Yagoda as an attempt to assassinate him. ”
 
Nikolai Yezhov had been Yagoda’s subordinate, but now Yezhov's first mission became to incriminate his old boss in a wide variety of fantastic crimes, hence the sprinkling of mercury to claim an assassination attempt.
 
Yagoda was shocked and he did not go as quietly as the others –
 
“Yagoda was found guilty of treason and conspiracy against the Soviet government at the Trial of the Twenty-One in March 1938. Unlike some of the other defendants, he put up resistance in the dock … Solzhenitsyn describes Yagoda as trusting in deliverance from Stalin even during the show trial itself: “Just as though Stalin had been sitting right there in the hall, Yagoda confidently and insistently begged him directly for mercy: "I appeal to you! For you I built two great canals!" And a witness reports that at just that moment a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second floor of the hall, apparently behind a muslin curtain, and, while it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen.””
 
Yagoda was stripped naked and beaten severely as a final insult, before being shot.
 
***
 
DANGER FLAGS, #2: OVERLOOKING
 
We arrive at the second chapter of our series on Danger Flags .
 
Again, the basic concept of Danger Flags  is an easy one to understand: before a person does something bad, there’s often predictable signs that they were going to do it.
 
Why, then, are we often so blind to bad things that might occur? Why are we surprised when a predictable bad thing… happens?
 
We can likely understand why Sergei Kirov was not fearing for his life even as his security melted away – no Soviet high officials to that time had been so brazenly assassinated, and – outside of Stalin who was still not quite yet Stalin  – the man had no enemies.
 
We can also perhaps understand why Zinoviev and Kamenev were not prepared to be arrested for this random thing they had nothing to do with. They were the first of the prominent Show Trials, and how could they have guessed that Stalin’s government would go in that direction?
 
But really, Yagoda of all people really should have known better.
 
Yagoda was systematically incriminating and destroying a number of people, in a brutal and repressive fashion, seeing broken promises of mercy left and right followed by brutality.
 
The only common thread among those people in high places he prosecuted was being a potential powerful rival to Stalin.
 
And, of course, in a government that heavily relies on repressive secret police, the head of the secret police is no doubt a potentially powerful rival.
 
Is this not obvious?
 
How could Yagoda miss it?
 
Why was he so surprised  when it happened to him?
 
This is the thrust of this chapter.
 
***
 
THE HUMAN TENDENCY TO OVERLOOK
 
Danger Flags are valuable little mental models to recognize and acknowledge. They can stop a lot of pain and misery from happening, by predicting and preventing bad things that can happen.

They’re also a great compass for self-improvement. For instance, nearly all varieties of discourtesy are danger flags, and whenever you catch yourself being discourteous, this should be a flag to you to scrub that out of your character.
 
People notice. Oh, they might not even notice that they noticed. But they do.
 
Or, at least – the sophisticated and discerning people notice.
 
But often, we  don’t notice. We become blind to our faults and the faults of others, and that leads us downwards. Not the good “go down before going up” downwards, but the “downwards forever to perdition” downwards.
 
Yagoda-downwards.
 
He pleaded, “For you I build two great canals!”
 
Alas.
 
Guilty.
 
Bang.
 
***
 
OVERLOOKING OBVIOUS COMING PROBLEMS: PAIN
 
Why do we overlook obvious problems?

“Many problems are caused by people’s mistakes. But people often find it difficult to identify and accept their own mistakes. Sometimes it’s because they’re blind to them, but more often it’s because ego and shortsightedness make discovering their mistakes and weaknesses painful. Because people are often upset when their mistakes are pointed out to them, most people are reluctant to point out mistakes in others. As a result, an objective diagnosis of problems arising from people’s mistakes is often missing and personal evolution is stunted. […] It is at this stage that most people fail to progress. More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don’t is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively. ” – Ray Dalio,  Principles
 
Well, that’s a simple and straightforward answer – pain.
 
But let’s not breeze past it too fast.
 
What is pain?
 
It’s a perceived sensation that’s a certain type of unpleasant. When we feel it, it makes us want to avoid that sensation. And how do we avoid pain? By avoiding painful stimuli.
 
We'll come back to this point momentarily.
 
***
 
OVERLOOKING OBVIOUS COMING PROBLEMS: JUSTIFICATION
 
Think for a moment about Yagoda. He’d had a lot of people killed and done a lot of terrible things.
 
The natural human response to doing terrible things isn’t to self-reflect – again, that’s painful – it’s to seek justification for why.
 
There’s no doubt to me that Yagoda “talked himself into” every one of his assassinations or framings. “Oh, Kirov was getting too big for his britches. Oh Lev, he thought he knew better than others.” No matter how trivial or spurious it might have been, Yagoda would need to do something  other than look in the mirror each day and say: “I’m a mass-murdering hack working for a brutal tyrant, killing any competent rivals to the tyrant even if they’re genuinely part of the same cause as me. If I became seen as a rival to the tyrant, I’ll be killed too.”
 
No, of course not. We in fact know  he didn’t think that way, because he was surprised at his own arrest and impending doom.
 
***
 
OVERLOOKING OBVIOUS COMING PROBLEMS: BELIEVING WE’RE THE EXCEPTION
 
Much of all of this insanity had been unleashed by, or at least sanctified, by the People's Commissar for Justice Nikolai Krylenko.
 
Wikipedia: Nikolai Krylenko  –
 
“Krylenko was an exponent of socialist legality and the theory that political considerations, rather than criminal guilt or innocence, should guide the application of punishment. Although a participant in the Show Trials and political repression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Krylenko was ultimately arrested himself during the Great Purge. Following interrogation and torture by the NKVD, Krylenko confessed to extensive involvement in wrecking and anti-Soviet agitation. He was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court, in a trial lasting 20 minutes, and executed immediately afterwards. ”
 
It’s common among humans to believe we’re the exception to external forces. Krylenko advocated a theory that “political considerations, rather than guilt or innocence, should guide the application of punishment” – he of course did not realize or consider that it might be politically valuable for him to be killed by his own system.
 
***
 
OVERLOOKING OBVIOUS COMING PROBLEMS: INTERNAL VIEW
 
The man who replaced and had Yagoda killed was Nikolai Yezhov.
 
Wikipedia  –
 
“[Yezhov] became People's Commissar for Internal Affairs (head of the NKVD) and a member of the Central Committee on September 26, 1936, following the dismissal of Genrikh Yagoda. […] Destruction of the old bolshevik cadres as well as Yagoda himself — all potential or imagined enemies of Stalin — was not a problem for Yezhov. As a devout Stalinist and not a member of the organs of state security, Yezhov was just the man Stalin needed to intensify the terror and rid Stalin of potential opponents. Yezhov's first task from Stalin was to personally investigate and conduct the prosecution of his long-time Chekist mentor Yagoda, which he did with remorseless zeal. Ordered by Stalin to create a suitably grandiose plot for Yagoda's show trial, Yezhov ordered the NKVD to sprinkle mercury on the curtains of his office so that the physical evidence could be collected and used to support the charge that Yagoda was a German spy, sent to assassinate Yezhov and Stalin with poison and restore capitalism. It's also claimed that he personally tortured both Yagoda and Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky to extract their confessions. ”
 
So, Yezhov is just as brutal as Yagoda, perhaps even moreso.
 
He also framed people and mis-managed any pretense of justice. Sprinkling mercury on curtains? It’s almost theatrically silly.
 
Moreover, Yezhov was now killing his predecessor . Surely, at least Yezhov must have  realized that the Soviet machine would someday eat him at some point?
 
But, no.
 
After being arrested, tortured, and placed on trial –
 
“Yezhov, like his predecessor Yagoda, maintained to the end his love for Stalin. Yezhov denied being a spy, a terrorist, or a conspirator, stating that he preferred "death to telling lies." He maintained that his previous confession had been obtained under torture, admitted that he purged 14,000 of his fellow Chekists, but said that he was surrounded by "enemies of the people." He also said that he would die with the name of Stalin on his lips. ”
 
What can we make of this insanity?
 
Certainly, we see elements of justification  in Yezhov – “he admitted that he purged [killed] 14,000 of his fellow Chekists, but said he was surrounded by “enemies of the people.””
 
So – there is that.
 
But over and beyond that, I contend that Yezhov was using an internal view  of his actions.
 
Internally, by whatever measures and thoughts and philosophies he had, his worldview made sense. His actions made sense. He believed that the best road to take was the one of complete loyalty to Stalin, that Stalin was a good and great and glorious and whatever, and that by being loyal to Stalin his life would work out well.
 
A simple external perspective – asking himself how he would be seen by others, inviting feedback and criticism, taking a neutral position – might have shown him to being doing some ugly, ugly stuff.
 
Likewise, he was constantly evaluating Stalin based on internal view ; he was evaluating Stalin as a devoted Stalinist. A neutral external view of Stalin would show him killing anyone who starts gaining popularity or power. Given that Yezhov was gaining some power, he really ought to have known Stalin would take his life too.
 
But – again, seeing the world objectively causes some measure of pain, and most people are unwilling to experience pain in the moment, and so Yezhov went about doing his macabre work without much self-reflection, leading towards its inevitable outcome.
 
Indeed, his successor – Lavrentiy Beria – had him strapped naked and beaten ferociously before being executed, following the treatment that Yezhov had inflicted on Yagoda.
 
***
 
ASSORTED DANGER FLAGS
 
We have certainly dug up some earth here. Let’s see if we can refine it.
 
I contend that all of the following are danger flags –
 
*Inability to face pain
*Regular justification
*Believing someone is the exception
*Only taking an internal view and not an external view
 
All of these contribute greatly to overlooking problems  – in both oneself and others.
 
If you meet someone who can’t handle pain (including constructive criticism), who justifies themself often, believe they’re the exception, or only runs on “internal view” – this type of person is almost certainly unfit for important roles in one’s life or organization.
 
In the absence of those four points, most flaws can be corrected, many areas with a lack of skill can be trained up, weaknesses can be overcome or navigated around.
 
With those four danger flags in place to a high degree, improvement becomes almost impossible. When someone flinches from anything undesirable or painful, they can’t evolve; when they justify themselves, even external failures or terrible things don’t shake them awake; when they believe they’re the exception, they can’t learn from obviously bad outcomes repeatedly happening to others in the field; when they take an internal view only, this means that everything is a series of delusions built on top of each other and reinforcing each other, which makes it nearly impossible improve or navigate around.
 
***
 
TRAINING: PAIN TOLERANCE
 
If you realized you had a hard time dealing with painful thoughts and ideas, the answer is probably not to just go to the biggest and craziest and most painful thing possible, but to gradually increase your pain tolerance for difficult intellectual ideas.
 
The most effective training is probably not from confronting gigantic fundamental worldview and identity aspects of oneself, but instead far simpler things like slightly greater athletic performance once fatigue kicks in, the ability to continue working effectively once you get tired, and regularly soliciting criticism from more skilled people in your profession or field.
 
All of these are to some degree unpleasant, but get easier over time. Pain tolerance can be gradually built – again, you don’t want to go too fast and get into a panic or get in over your head – it can be gradually built.
 
The ability to persist through endurance training when it starts to hurt does seem to generalize to the ability to push through on difficult intellectual work.
 
Likewise, talking oneself into and completing a little more work when truly tired makes you realize the body and mind has excess resources and capacity and makes pain less terrifying and dreadful, until it becomes somewhat mundane. Still annoying and unpleasant to some degree, but mundane instead of dreadful.
 
Criticism, of course, is nearly universally valuable when coming from credible people who care about you. By regularly soliciting and implementing it, that actually does go from painful to pleasurable over time – seeing flaws and weaknesses eventually is a joyful thing, since you know you’ll correct them and improve as a result.
 
***
 
TRAINING: AGAINST JUSTIFICATION
 
This is simple enough.
 
Never make excuses or justify yourself.
 
It’s a process. If you currently make excuses, it’s a process to cease doing so.
 
A great way to ensure you’re not making excuses is to do this whenever you’re tempted to do so:
 
*Assert the responsibility is yours first.
*Explain what happened.
*Explain how you’ll do better next time.
 
So instead of, “Sorry I’m late, there was a lot of terrific…”
 
Instead, you would say, “It’s totally unacceptable I’m late, I need to make sure I’m here on time. There was traffic, but that’s no excuse – on a rainy day, I should leave my home at least an hour before rush hour starts to ensure I'm here on time.”
 
There is the larger point about justifying right and wrong… that could be its own entire piece, and I’m not sure I could even cover it adequately, but I’ll point out that typically when we feel the need to justify ourselves, it’s either because we don’t want to accept responsibility for failure or because we believe what we’re doing is wrong on some level.
 
This isn’t always true, but if you catch yourself justifying, that would be a good time to examine your behavior around there very thoroughly.
 
***
 
TRAINING: BASE RATES AND NEUTRALITY
 
Finally, in regards to believing one is the exception  and excessively taking internal view  and neglecting what’s really happening, there are some good ways to get over those.
 
The first is that, in any new endeavor, you should look to find the base rates of success and failure  in that endeavor. Then your first assessment of how likely you are to succeed or fail should be set to the base rate.
 
If 90% of companies fail, then your base rate of failing if you start a company is… 90%.
 
If you believed you’re the exception or took the internal view only (say, looking at the great things your new company can do, but not searching for what the market dislikes  about you, neglecting risks, not noticing impact areas you’re weak on)… well, you might estimate you’ve got a 50% to 70% chance of success.
 
And then you’d fail.
 
I almost universally recommend people try to figure out the base rates of success and failure early on anything they want to do.
 
But sometimes I get pushback; someone will say, “If I knew the real base rates, I would never get started.”
 
Eh, I disagree.
 
The base rates aren’t written in stone; most of the time, there’s no natural law about them.
 
If your base rate of failure is 90%, that doesn’t mean you’re stuck there. Many companies, for instance, fail because they’re undercapitalized – they don’t have enough money in the bank. That means a company can be a good company, can be succeeding, but if they have a bad three months in a row, they go out of business.
 
If you were “totally sure this is going to work,” you might fail to notice that a lot of good companies die when they hit a cash shortfall, and you might not build up cash reserves or lines of credit or fundraise aggressively enough.
 
Likewise, there’s a term in business called “single source dependency” – it refers to having a single supplier, marketing channel, or buyer from you account for a critically large part of the business you do.
 
Single source dependency kills a lot of companies. If you knew going into a business that a lot of companies in your space died because they were relying on a single critical outside organization, you might give a paranoid amount of focus to ensuring you have backup suppliers, multiple channels of new customers, and a diversity of existing customer base – so a single loss doesn’t put you under.
 
If you find yourself saying, “We’ve got a great company here, we’ve got a 95% chance of success” – you’re doing something wrong. If you say, “Most companies fail; 90% fail and only 10% succeed. So we’re paranoid about this, we work constantly to have enough money in the bank, have a really amazing team, only have excellent people on the team, fanatically work to ensure we have the best products and services, constantly check out what the competition is doing to see if they’re putting out better products than us, connect with customers constantly and then never take our customers for granted…” – when someone talks like that, indeed, they have a much better chance of success than 10%.
 
It’s very easy to fix believing you’re the exception or getting stuck in a death spiral of the inside view alone – constantly assess base rates of success and failure and chances of events happening, as if you’re a neutral observer. It breaks you out of undue hope or fear, it gets you off optimism and naivete, it brings you towards a neutral base where you can make improvements and ensure things work out.
 
***
 
BUT WHAT COULD THOSE SOVIET SECURITY CHIEFS DONE?
 
Yagoda assassinates Kirov; Yezhov has Yagoda killed; Beria kills Yezhov.
 
And now it’s Beria’s turn.
 
Wikipedia: Lavrentiy Beria: Stalin’s Death  –
 
“Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Beria had, immediately after Stalin's stroke, gone about "spewing hatred against [Stalin] and mocking him." When Stalin showed signs of consciousness, Beria dropped to his knees and kissed his hand. When Stalin fell unconscious again, Beria immediately stood and spat. ”
 
Beria had survived Stalin’s reign. Stalin died on 5 March 1953.
 
And indeed, after Stalin’s death Beria became one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union for a brief time.
 
Well, a very brief time.
 
About a month.
 
Downfall –
 
“On 26 June 1953, Beria was arrested and held in an undisclosed location near Moscow. Accounts of Beria's fall vary considerably. By the most likely account, Khrushchev prepared an elaborate ambush, convening a meeting of the Presidium on 26 June, where he suddenly launched a scathing attack on Beria, accusing him of being a traitor and spy in the pay of British intelligence. Beria was taken completely by surprise. He asked, "What's going on, Nikita Sergeyevich? Why are you picking fleas in my trousers?" Molotov and others quickly spoke against Beria one after the other, followed by a motion by Khrushchev for his instant dismissal. When Beria finally realized what was happening and plaintively appealed to Malenkov to speak for him, his old friend and crony silently hung his head and refused to meet his gaze. Malenkov pressed a button on his desk as the pre-arranged signal to Marshal Georgy Zhukov and a group of armed officers in a nearby room. They burst in and arrested Beria. ”
 
Did he did with dignity?
 
… nope:
 
“Beria and all the other defendants were sentenced to death on 23 December 1953. When the death sentence was passed, Beria pleaded on his knees for mercy before collapsing to the floor and wailing and crying energetically, but to no avail. The other six defendants were executed by firing squad on the same day the trial ended. Beria was executed separately. He was shot through the forehead by General Pavel Batitsky who had to stuff a rag into Beria's mouth to silence his bawling (his final moments bore great similarity to those of his own predecessor, NKVD Chief Nikolai Yezhov, who begged for his life before his execution in 1940). ”
 
I have suggested you should danger-flag people with an inability to face pain, people who regularly justify their actions instead of reasoning and accepting responsibility, who believe they’re the exception or only take an internal view of success and failure and neglect an external view.
 
If you have these qualities in yourself, you should gradually train them out of yourself and become more reliable and steadfast and strong as a result.
 
But what you should you have done if you were in the Soviet Union? Could you have survived?
 
And the answer, actually, is yes  – if you merely did two things. (1) Stay out of politics entirely, and (2) do something else that was useful.
 
Mikhail Kalashnikov  was born in 1919, and died in his bed in 2013.
 
He did this by being… useful. When he was wounded as a tank commander fighting the Germans, he paid attention to what problems other soldiers had:
 
"I was in the hospital, and a soldier in the bed beside me asked: ‘Why do our soldiers have only one rifle for two or three of our men, when the Germans have automatics?’ So I designed one. I was a soldier, and I created a machine gun for a soldier. It was called an Avtomat Kalashnikova, the automatic weapon of Kalashnikov—AK—and it carried the date of its first manufacture, 1947. "
 
He reflected later that if it wasn’t for the Nazis, he probably would have made tractors and lawnmowers.
 
So what could Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria have done?
 
(1) not gone into politics,
(2) done something else useful instead.
 
The Soviets had great regard for their Chess players, their sportsmen, their engineers and those working on the Space Race, their weapons manufacturers, and so on.
 
Sometimes a particular field is just despicable in a given era, and to enter that field in that era is to enter into despicability – with all its attendant consequences.
 
If you wanted to be involved in the defense of the Soviet Union, you wanted to be Kalashnikov and not Yagoda, Yezhov, or Beria.
 
Contrast Kalashnikov's way of speaking and acting with all those commissars who brought upon their own doom:

"When a young man, I read somewhere the following: God the Almighty said, 'All that is too complex is unnecessary, and it is simple that is needed' ... So this has been my lifetime motto – I have been creating weapons to defend the borders of my fatherland, to be simple and reliable."
 
Simple, hard-working, driven, useful – and not coming to be danger-flagged by all the various treacherous politicians and commissars of the era. Kalashnikov just did his work.
 
In any event, overlooking  certainly leads to downfall.
 
Do danger-flag and be exceedingly cautious around people with an inability to face pain, people who justify themselves, and people who believe they’re an exception and who won’t external perspectives.
 
If you see these aspects in yourself, train to get rid of them.
 
Pain in the moment is hard, and perhaps undesirable, but in the long run – far, far better than the alternative.