There’s a very real sense in which Soviet totalitarianism contained the seeds of its own destruction. When you attempt to control everything, you also politicize everything.
The system, in attempting to control every aspect of society, creates the possibility of dissent. That’s exactly what happened in the 1950s and repeated itself over and over again until the very end.
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— Anne Applebaum, in an interview in the New Statesman, titled, “Why did so many people co-operate with what were clearly evil and unjust regimes?”
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