Recently, a bright-eyed and cheerful twenty-six-year-old California woman told me that she thinks of herself as a communist. “It’s just so beautiful, this dream of everybody being equal,” she gushed. When she asked me what I was working on, I told her about the struggles of Alexander Ogorodnikov, a Christian dissident imprisoned and tortured by the Soviets, whom I had recently interviewed in Moscow. She fell silent. “Don’t you know about the gulag?” I asked, naively. Of course she didn’t. Nobody ever told her. We, her parents and grandparents, have failed her generation. And if she develops no
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