Famous Soviet Union Quotes

life expectancy among working-class white Americans had been decreasing since the early 2000s. In modern history the only obvious parallel was with Russia in the desperate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. One journalistic essay and academic research paper after another confirmed the disaster, until the narrative was capped in 2015 by Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s famous account of “deaths of despair.

In the 17th century, the French statesman Cardinal Richelieu famously said, “Show me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough therein to hang him.” Lavrentiy Beria, head of Joseph Stalin’s secret police in the old Soviet Union, declared, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Both were saying the same thing: if you have enough data about someone, you can find sufficient evidence to find him guilty of something.

We are in Chicago. A famous American poet once called it ‘the city of the big shoulders,’ you know.” “We have bad poetry in the Soviet Union, too,” I consoled, and she burst out laughing.

Some societies tried to solve the problem by establishing a central barter system that collected products from specialist growers and manufacturers and distributed them to those who needed them. The largest and most famous such experiment was conducted in the Soviet Union, and it failed miserably. ‘Everyone would work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs’ turned in practice into ‘everyone would work as little as they can get away with, and receive as much as they could grab’.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

Some societies tried to solve the problem by establishing a central barter system that collected products from specialist growers and manufacturers and distributed them to those who needed them. The largest and most famous such experiment was conducted in the Soviet Union, and it failed miserably. ‘Everyone would work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs’ turned out in practice into ‘everyone would work as little as they can get away with, and receive as much as they could grab’.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Saudi regime saw an opportunity to rid itself, however temporarily, of the holy warriors it had nurtured for nearly a century. With economic and military support from the United States and tactical training provided by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the Saudis began funneling a steady stream of radical Islamic militants (known as the Mujahadin, or “those who make jihad”) from Saudi Arabia and across the Middle East into Afghanistan, where they could be put to use battling the godless communists. The intention, as President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, famously put it, was to “give the USSR its own Vietnam” by keeping the Soviet army bogged down in an unwinnable war in hostile territory. The United States considered the Mujahadin to be an important ally in the Great Game being played out against the Soviet Union and, in fact, referred to these militants as “freedom fighters.” President Ronald Reagan even compared them to America’s founding fathers.

Some societies tried to solve the problem by establishing a central barter system that collected products from specialist growers and manufacturers and distributed them to those who needed them. The largest and most famous such experiment was conducted in the Soviet Union, and it failed miserably. ‘Everyone would work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs’ turned out in practice into ‘everyone would work as little as they can get away with, and receive as much as they could grab’. More moderate and more successful experiments were made on other occasions, for example in the Inca Empire. Yet most societies found a more easy way to connect large numbers of experts – they developed money.

Among the girls at this party were a number of the now-famous wives of Americans and Britons who are not permitted to leave the Soviet Union. Pretty and rather sad girls. They cannot join their husbands in England or America, and so they are employed by their embassies until some final decision is reached. There are many things we cannot understand about the Soviet Union, and this is one of them. There are not more than fifty of these women. They are no good to the Soviet Union. They are suspected. Russians do not associate with them, and yet they are not permitted to leave. And on these fifty women, these fifty unimportant women, the Soviet Union has got itself more bad publicity than on any other single small item. Of course this situation cannot arise again, since by a new decree no Russian may marry a foreigner. But here they sit in Moscow, these sad women, no longer Russians, and they have not become British or American. And we cannot understand the reasoning which keeps them here. Perhaps it is just that the Russians do not intend to be told what to do about anything by anyone else. It might be as simple as that. When Clement Attlee personally requested that they be sent out of Russia, he was told, in effect, to mind his own business. It is just one more of the international stupidities which seem to be on the increase in the world. Sometimes it seems that the leaders of nations are little boys with chips on their shoulders, daring each other to knock them off.

The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized. Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are "homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane. If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.

Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned

gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.

Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned out badly, you might get shot. Better to avoid all responsibility. An example of what could happen

Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest. Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine. In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.

This wider history notwithstanding, I believe India still constitutes a special case. Its distinctiveness is threefold. First, the tradition of the thinker-activist persisted far longer in India than elsewhere. While the men who founded the United States in the late eighteenth century had fascinating ideas about democracy and nationhood, thereafter American politicians have merely governed and ruled, or sometimes misgoverned and misruled.1 Their ideas, such as these are, have come from professional ideologues or intellectuals. On the other hand, from the first decades of the nineteenth century until the last decades of the twentieth century, the most influential political thinkers in India were, as often as not, its most influential political actors. Long before India was conceived of as a nation, in the extended run-up to Indian independence, and in the first few decades of freedom, the most interesting reflections on society and politics were offered by men (and women) who were in the thick of political action. Second, the relevance of individual thinkers too has lasted longer in India. For instance, Lenin’s ideas were influential for about seventy years, that is to say, from the time the Soviet state was founded to the time it disappeared. Mao’s heyday was even shorter—roughly three decades, from the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 to the repudiation by Deng Xiaoping of his mentor’s ideas in the late 1970s. Turning to politicians in Western Europe, Churchill’s impassioned defence of the British Empire would find no takers after the 1950s. De Gaulle was famous for his invocation of the ‘grandeur de la France’, but those sentiments have now been (fortunately?) diluted and domesticated by the consolidation of the European Union. On the other hand, as this book will demonstrate, Indian thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still speak in many ways to the concerns of the present. A third difference has to do with the greater diversity of thinkers within the Indian political tradition. Even Gandhi and Nehru never held the kind of canonical status within their country as Mao or Lenin did in theirs. At any given moment, there were as many Indians who were opposed to their ideas as were guided by them. Moreover, the range of issues debated and acted upon by politicians and social reformers appears to have been far greater in India than in other countries. This depth and diversity of thought was, as I argue below, in good part a product of the depth and diversity of the society itself.

Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window was among the paintings rescued from destruction during the bombing of Dresden in World War II, The painting was stored, with other works of art, in a tunnel in Saxon, Switzerland; when the Red Army encountered them, they took them. The Soviets portrayed this as an act of rescue; some others as an act of plunder. Either way, after the death of Joseph Stalin, the Soviets decided in 1955 to return the art to Germany, “for the purpose of strengthening and furthering the progress of friendship between the Soviet and German peoples.” Aggrieved at the thought of losing hundreds of paintings, art historians and museum curators in the Soviet Union suggested that “in acknowledgment for saving and returning the world-famous treasures of the Dresden Gallery” the Germans should perhaps donate to them Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window and Sleeping Venus by Giorgione. The Germans did not take to the idea, and the painting was returned. Well-preserved, it is on display at the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden.

The facial stills that Mario lap-dissolves between are of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, founding standard-bearer of the seminal new ‘Clean U.S. Party,’ the strange-seeming but politically prescient annular agnation of ultra-right jingoist hunt-deer-with-automatic-weapons types and far-left macrobiotic Save-the-Ozone, -Rain-Forests, -Whales, -Spotted-Owl-and-High-pH-Waterways ponytailed granola-crunchers, a surreal union of both Rush L.– and Hillary R.C.–disillusioned fringes that drew mainstream-media guffaws at their first Convention (held in sterile venue), the seemingly LaRoucheishly marginal party whose first platform’s plank had been Let’s Shoot Our Wastes Into Space, 150 C.U.S.P. a kind of post-Perot national joke for three years, until—white-gloved finger on the pulse of an increasingly asthmatic and sunscreen-slathered and pissed-off American electorate—the C.U.S.P. suddenly swept to quadrennial victory in an angry reactionary voter-spasm that made the U.W.S.A. and LaRouchers and Libertarians chew their hands in envy as the Dems and G.O.P.s stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who each think the other’s surely got it, the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and -Jihad era when—somehow even worse—there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate and fear.

Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned out badly, you might get shot. Better to avoid all responsibility. An example of what could happen

The situation was similar in the Soviet Union, with industry playing the role of sugar in the Caribbean. Industrial growth in the Soviet Union was further facilitated because its technology was so backward relative to what was available in Europe and the United States, so large gains could be reaped by reallocating resources to the industrial sector, even if all this was done inefficiently and by force. Before 1928 most Russians lived in the countryside. The technology used by peasants was primitive, and there were few incentives to be productive. Indeed, the last vestiges of Russian feudalism were eradicated only shortly before the First World War. There was thus huge unrealized economic potential from reallocating this labor from agriculture to industry. Stalinist industrialization was one brutal way of unlocking this potential. By fiat, Stalin moved these very poorly used resources into industry, where they could be employed more productively, even if industry itself was very inefficiently organized relative to what could have been achieved. In fact, between 1928 and 1960 national income grew at 6 percent a year, probably the most rapid spurt of economic growth in history up until then. This quick economic growth was not created by technological change, but by reallocating labor and by capital accumulation through the creation of new tools and factories. Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy.

President Truman’s message to Stalin could not have been clearer if written in blood. It was a warning not to contemplate starting a new war in Europe trusting in the Red Army’s old-fashioned strength in numbers. And it signaled more concisely than any speech that Truman had accepted the central argument of George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram,” sent from the U.S. embassy in Moscow six months before the tests: the Soviet Union had to be contained. As Truman himself put it: “If we could just have Stalin and his boys see one of these things, there wouldn’t be any question about another war.

What is interesting is that the term Aryan was adopted by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler in the early 20th century to describe a people group they deemed as purely Germanic (must be of one people group) and more “evolved” than the rest of European peoples and the rest of the world. And yet, the true Aryans were one of the most famous groups of people who were of mixed descent. Hitler and the Nazis were playing off of Charles Darwin’s model of higher and lower races. This idea, claimed by this humanistic religion, has been a cause of terrible atrocities in WWI, WWII, and mass exterminations of people by leaders like Stalin (Soviet Union) and Mao (China), among others.

The scale of the cruelty and suffering and loss was beyond my comprehension. The most famous number, of course, was six million: the number of Jews killed by the Nazis as they implemented the madness of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” But tens of millions more had died, too—another forty million civilians, by some reckonings, and twenty-five million soldiers. Although some four hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were killed in three and a half years of fighting—a dreadful toll, to be sure—American losses represented only a tiny fraction of the war’s total. In China, the war dead totaled nearly four million soldiers and sixteen million civilians as Japan’s armies cut a deadly swath through China. The Soviet Union lost twenty million people as well, almost equally divided between soldiers and civilians, as the German army ground itself down in a prolonged and bloody eastern campaign. Seventy-two million deaths, by bombings, firestorms, massacres, diseases, starvation. How was it possible, I wondered, for so many people to die in such a short time without the very fabric of civilization collapsing? And

To use Freud's famous phrase, the civilized are, therefore, the discontent. We do not become losers in civilization but become civilized losers. The collective result of this ineradicable sense of failure is that civilizations take on the spirit of resentment. Acutely sensitive to an imagined audience, they are easily offended by other civilizations. Indeed, even the most powerful societies can be embarrassed by the weakest: the Soviet Union by Afghanistan, Great Britain by Argentina, the United States by Grenada.

In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter believed that socialism would inevitably triumph over capitalism. In 1970, when Paul Samuelson published the eighth edition of his famous textbook, he was still predicting that the GDP of the Soviet Union might outstrip that of the United States sometime between 1990 and 2000.

…I am a storyteller. From barstools to back porches, from kitchen tables to campfires, from podiums to park benches, I have spun my yarns to audiences both big and small, both rapt and bored. I didn’t start out that way. I was just a dreamer, quietly imagining myself as something special, as someone who would “make a difference” in the world. But the fact is, I was just an ordinary person leading an ordinary life. Then, partly by design, partly by happenstance, I was thrust into a series of adventures and circumstances beyond anything I had ever dreamed. It all started when I ran away from home at eighteen and hitchhiked around the country. Then I joined the Army, became an infantry lieutenant, and went to Vietnam. After Vietnam, I tried to become a hippie, got involved with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and became a National Coordinator for the organization. I was subsequently indicted for conspiracy to incite a riot at the Republican Convention in 1972—the so-called Gainesville Eight case—and one of my best friends turned out to be an FBI informant who testified against me at the trial. In the early eighties, I was involved with the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission, which built a memorial for Vietnam veterans in New York City and published the book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam. In the late eighties, I was part of a delegation of Vietnam veterans who went to the Soviet Union to meet with Soviet veterans of their Afghanistan War. I fell in love with a woman from Russia, married her, and spent nine years living there, during which I fathered two children, then brought my family back to the U.S. and the suburban middle-class life I had left so many years before. The adventures ultimately, inevitably perhaps, ended, and like Samwise Gamgee, I returned to an ordinary life once they were over. The only thing I had left from that special time was the stories… I wrote this book for two reasons. First and foremost, I wrote it for my children. Their experience of me is as a slightly boring “soccer dad,” ordinary and unremarkable. I wanted them to know who I was and what I did before I became their dad. More importantly, I hope the book can be inspiring to the entire younger generation they represent, who will have to deal with the mess of a world that we have left them. The second reason is that when I was young, I had hoped that my actions would “make a difference,” but I’m not so sure if they amounted to “a hill of beans,” as Humphry Bogart famously intoned. If my actions did not change the world, then I dream that maybe my stories can.

Language had a role to play in all this, the written language of course, but especially the spoken form. Some of the most problematic words created unimaginable difficulties, such as ‘gentleman’, ‘lady’ or ‘miss’, to cite only three. These words were rightly considered significant obstacles in the transition to communism. Each communist country had had its own experience of its language, often strange, as in the case of Albania. This little country, generally famous for its failings and backwardness, took an unexpected approach to these three words. Whereas the word ‘gentleman’ disappeared from currency in the very first phase of socialism, like in the Soviet Union, the word ‘lady’ had a certain staying power. But the nicest surprise turned out to be the word ‘miss’. There was a determined effort to replace it, because in Albanian it carried the affectionate connotations of the word ‘mother’, especially in primary schools. Despite the annoyance it caused, it was used by tens of thousands of little children instead of the word ‘teacher’. Efforts to supplant it failed one after another. The children stubbornly continued to call their teachers ‘miss’. It was this army of countless toddlers that proved indomitable, and the word ‘miss’ with its striking

Tonight," said Potapov, and his wrinkled nose quivered above his thin lips, "we intend to adopt a new resolution, not only for Ispas, but for all the villages in the region. From this moment on, until further notice, every breeder of horses, like you, Comrade Lazar, will endeavor— No, he won't try, he will succeed! - Yes, he will succeed 100 percent The pregnancy and birth of all female mares!" The fifty people in the hall fell silent, and Potapov asked, "Is that clear? Something unclear in my words?" "Something unclear in my words?" Isabel came back after him. "Yes, Comrade Potapov," said Roman. "There are some unclear things." Isabelle and Sissy pinched him, and Isabelle continued to whisper in Potapov's unpleasant tenor voice, "One hundred percent pregnancy and birth of all female mares!" Sissy almost laughed out loud. Roman broke away from his wife and sister and walked to the aisle between the pews, from which He could speak without interruption from them. "You said you were an animal enclosure expert from Moscow?" Roman asked. "Please teach us how to achieve such extraordinary results." Ostap rose - Ostap, who never spoke at these assemblies! Even Yana was shocked. "Forgive me," said Ostap, seeming not to believe his own impudence, "but that's what they call female mares in Moscow, 'mares women'? Because here in Ukraine they simply say 'mares'." "Never mind," said Potapov. "And the mares, by the way, don't give birth," added Ostap with eyes burning with hatred and in a low voice with contempt. "They give birth." "Well, let's talk." Potapov pointed to the members of the Lazar family who were sitting with Mirik and Petka. "Comrade Zhuk told me about you, the Lazar family," Potapov said. Petka immediately got up and moved to another place. Mirik also moved his chair a little further - only a few centimeters, but still! He was staying away so he wouldn't be lumped in with those troublesome lazars, Isabelle thought. Unbelievable. Problematic like his wife, himself and his flesh. "We believe," said Potapov, "that you are using your horses by means of sabotage against the Soviet state." "And how do we do that?" asked Roman, who stood beside his brother. By having your mares give birth only once a year!" I don't create a horse, Comrade Potapov, I only quarter him." The mare's gestation period is eleven months," Roman said. "If you need to improve! Why do your horses, which you are apparently so famous for, only give birth to one foal per horse?" Potapov asked. "Why is their pregnancy so long? Almost a year? It's unthinkable! Can't you speed up the birth earlier and quarter them again? Or see if there's a way to make a mare carry two foals in one place? That would be very productive!" The members of the Lazar family looked forward and not at each other, lest they openly express contempt and be arrested for the crime of rowing under the Soviet Union. It is impossible to respect something that is despised, the Christian Jesus was right in that, Isabel thought, and wished that Roman would bite his tongue. Vitaly and Stan, Oleg Tretyak, the evicted Kubal, and most recently Andreyush - all these poor people were witnesses and victims of Stalin's total dedication to the reign of terror. Soon even the pretense that the rule of law exists will be abandoned. Yana got to her feet with an effort and held the chair rest. "I have to go," she said. "As you can see, I'm a pregnant female about to give birth. But maybe the experts from Moscow should spend some time around the stable during the calving season before they start giving recommendations." Yana nodded to Roman and Ostap and left the hall with a wobbly gait. Isabelle thought that Yana was slowing down for Potapov's sake. Just a few hours ago she jumped on the back of a horse and then got off above him without help and without effort. Potapov paid no attention to Yana's words or to her departure. "We need to solve th''e horse problem!" said the man.

The largest and most famous such experiment was conducted in the Soviet Union, and it failed miserably. ‘Everyone would work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs’ turned out in practice into ‘everyone would work as little as they can get away with, and receive as much as they could grab’.

Marx famously called religion the opium of the people, and when Lenin founded the Soviet Union, he agreed, saying it was “used for the…stupefaction of the working class.” But neither man had ever been to the United States, to see that for Americans it was as much or more a stimulant and hallucinogen than a stupefying opiate.

where Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist most famous for having designed the “shock therapy” reforms applied to the former Soviet Union, had a live-on-video-link session in which he startled everyone by presenting what careful journalists might describe as an “unusually candid” assessment of those in charge of America’s financial institutions. Sachs’s testimony is especially valuable because, as he kept emphasizing, many of these people were quite up front with him because they assumed (not entirely without reason) that he was on their side: Look, I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now . . . I know them. These are the people I have lunch with. And I am going to put it very bluntly: I regard the moral environment as pathological. [These people] have no responsibility to pay taxes; they have no responsibility to their clients; they have no responsibility to counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control in a quite literal sense, and they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent. They genuinely believe they have a God-given right to take as much money as they possibly can in any way that they can get it, legal or otherwise. If you look at the campaign contributions, which I happened to do yesterday for another purpose, the financial markets are the number one campaign contributors in the US system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core . . . both parties are up to their necks in this. But what it’s led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning, and you feel it on the individual level right now. And it’s very, very unhealthy, I have waited for four years . . . five years now to see one figure on Wall Street speak in a moral language. And I’ve have not seen it once.20 So there you have it. If Sachs was right—and honestly, who is in a better position to know?—then at the commanding heights of the financial system, we’re not actually talking about bullshit jobs. We’re not even talking about people who have come to believe their own propagandists. Really we’re just talking about a bunch of crooks.