The importance of being Bering

Why was Vitus Bering so important? He was a Danish cartographer who later became a naturalised Russian naval officer and explorer. In the early 18th century, during two expeditions financed by Tsar Peter the Great, Bering discovered the Strait — the 53-mile sea lane between Alaska and Siberia — which is named after him. The Bering Strait was recently in the news again because of the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.

So what? Straits are two a penny. Why does Bering merit 20 pages of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Bolshaya Sovietskaya Enciklopediya) — the major Soviet reference book? To be precise, I should use the past tense: why did he merit 20 pages in that Encyclopedia in the year 1956?

With the help of my old friend Gabor Temes, I am going to tell the story.

We both graduated from the Technical University of Budapest in 1952 as electrical engineers. At present we are both Professors of Electrical Engineering: Gabor in Oregon, myself in Oxford.

First, here is Gabor’s story.

“In 1953, I worked at the Department of Theoretical Electricity of the Technical University of Budapest, as an assistant professor. The Head of the Department was Dr Karoly Simonyi, a highly respected young professor. He spent a long time in the Soviet Union as a prisoner of war after World War Two, and learned Russian. When he returned to Hungary, he subscribed to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

“One day, Professor Simonyi came to the office puzzled. He told us that he had received in the mail a package containing some new pages for his Encyclopedia, with instructions to replace the existing ones with a detailed description of the Bering Strait, telling the story of its discovery, with a tribute to Russian explorers in general.

“He was also ordered to destroy the pages from page 1 to page 2. The puzzle was solved when he looked at the pages to be deleted. They described (and highly praised) the life and career of Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Head of the NKVD, member of the Politburo and deputy prime minister. He deduced that Beria must suddenly have became a nonperson. This was not immediately known, but the signs were unmistakable, and later made official. The excellent movie The Death of Stalin (banned in Russia) gives a credible description of the events which led to the demise of the most powerful mass murderer after Stalin.

“George Orwell would have been delighted to see this accurate replay of some parts of his Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Here is my story.

At the time of our graduation it was easy to find good employment in Budapest. I got a job in the Telecommunications Research Institute. My experience was similar to that of my friend concerning the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The difference was that all information came through the filter of Mrs Klug, our librarian. She liked to research the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. By the summer of 1956 this could be done without fear of arrest. The joke that did the rounds  at the time was saying: “One never knows what the past will bring.”

Our librarian kept on finding major contradictions in Soviet history and told us the juicy ones without delay. Mrs Klug got the same package as Professor Simonyi. She immediately solved the riddle of the sudden importance of Vitus Bering. The first three letters of his name gave away the story: B E R. The same three letters as in the name of Beria. As encyclopedias go this means that their entries are next to each other. Hence, Beria becoming a non-person could be easily accommodated. Beria’s entry could be reduced to half a page from 20, and Bering could be expanded from half a page to 20 and then all the following pages had the correct numbering.

What happened to Beria? Actually, he did not become a non-person. In the half a page allotted to him he was accused of all the crimes in the communist hell. He was quite high in that diabolical hierarchy, second only to Leon Trotsky. Alas, I remember only one of his supposed crimes. According to the new official version of his biography, at the time of the Russian Civil War, Beria was supposedly a British spy.

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