I would highly recommend that EVERYONE here go back to the seventies and read the fantastic book, The Russians, by Hedrick Smith. I read it before my first trip there in ‘77 and it was SO helpful and eye-opening.
Mr. Smith wrote a sequel after the offical ‘fall’ of communism, but you all should really read The Russians, now in paperback.
Re: “While Commissars like Dodd luxuriate in their spacious dachas in the country, the wretched proles get to eke out a subsistence living in dreary block housing built by union labor with inferior foreign construction materials. Sounds familiar. Still think they aren’t really Communists, America?”
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Nope — well before the ‘08 election I already KNEW they were Communists, as did many of us here.