In Turkestan, Calder was chauffeured across a desert during a snowstorm. Through the car window, he noticed that the side of the road was lined with a continuous pile of logs, covered by the drifting snow. The logs had not been stacked correctly; often his chauffeur had to stop the car and move them over to the side of the road. When Calder asked where all the wood had come from in a desert region, the chauffeur had burst out laughing: “Those aren’t logs. This road leads out of the Soviet Union to countries where you can have food by merely going into a restaurant. Thousands of peasants . . .
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