She was thinking about how a few simple items could transform your experience of the world. How rapidly one could come to expect the conveniences of air travel and warm toilets, how desperately one would long to have them back if they were taken away, the lengths one would go to, to preserve one’s access to them. For all that Beria and his ilk had soldiers, police, and torturers at their beck and call, their ability to give or take mere conveniences must, in the aggregate, confer more power by far.
