Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 Totalitarianism is a concept developed in the West after World War II to describe the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which were tyrannies of a very different nature from the traditional authoritarianisms of the nineteenth century.

#2 The idea that the Soviet Union was trying to create a new type of man, who was not only free of his freedom, but also afraid of it, was illustrated by the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which centers around the inmates of an insane asylum who lead lives of childish inanity under the eyes of a tyrannical Big Nurse.

#3 In the early 1980s, the Chinese communist leadership began permitting peasants, who made up 80 percent of the country’s population, to grow and sell their own food. In 1986, the Soviet press began to publish articles critical of the crimes of the Stalin era.

#4 The most basic weakness of the Soviet system was economic. It was much more difficult to tolerate economic failure in the Soviet system because the regime had explicitly based its claims to legitimacy on its ability to deliver its people a high material standard of living.