Leotards for the Proletariat

One of the first "heavy" books we ever read was Hedrick Smith's The Russians, which came out at the height of the whole "Evil Empire" period. Before cracking open Smith's honest investigation of daily life in the U.S.S.R., we imagined that Moscow resembled a vast outdoor version of the Death Star, absolutely devoid of color or joy. The Russians drove home a point that now seems obvious, but was tough for a 12-year-old to grasp amidst the mid-1980s hysteria: a nation's politics, no matter how ...