Ship of Fools
...They were leftists all right. In between palsies of fretting, they’d tell you how wonderful the Soviet union was: Pensions were huge, housing was cheap, and they practically paid you to get medical care. Believe me, you haven’t been bored until you’ve been buttonholed by a seventy-year-old woman who holds forth all afternoon on the perfidity of American foreign policy and shows you pictures of her grandchildren. These were people who believed everything about the Soviet union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper....