Emigrés from Communist states are astonished by the amount of bureaucracy they find in the West. Two Soviet immigrants to Canada complained, independently of each other, that “bureaucracy here was even worse than at home” (Monthly Review, 5/88). East Germans living in the West were staggered by the flood of complicated forms they had to fill out for taxes, health insurance, life insurance, unemployment compensation, job retraining, rent subsidies, and bank accounts. Furthermore, “because of the kind of personal information they had to give, they felt more observed and spied on than they were
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