It’s a gruesome story, but probably typical for its time: At a mining enterprise, the best miners had been awarded stereos, they were given them as holiday presents. That night, the entire family of one of those miners was murdered. The killer didn’t take anything else—just the stereo. A plastic Panasonic! A box! In Moscow, there were luxury cars and supermarkets, but just beyond the Garden Ring, people marveled at the most basic stereo. The local “capitalists” that my editor had dreamed of walked around surrounded by men with machine guns. They wouldn’t even go to the bathroom without a
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