HOW RUSSIA AS IT IS WAS WRITTEN
I was born in 1958 in Moscow, USSR and immigrated to the United States in 1979. I arrived in New York, and in 1984 graduated from Columbia University. At the time, the Communist system was a real contender for world domination, and a world war seemed possible. In America, the Soviet system was presented as uniformly bad, common people were seen as suffering under it, but, because of the Communist tyranny, they were seen as unable to change the way they lived, to bring about American-style democracy that they surely were dreaming of. As much as I hated the Communist system, I knew that such a description of it was very inadequate.
That was the time when Italy and France had huge Communist parties, and indeed, most of my professors in Columbia were left-leaning, unable to understand why did I leave the Soviet Union. As moths are attracted to fire, people were drawn to the Communist ideals (and it was not at all clear what those ideals were) only to be destroyed by them. I felt that we needed to formulate what was the cause of this attraction.
Another related topic was that of envy, which is the worlds last remaining taboo subject. An economics textbook that does not exhaustively discuss envy and such manifestations of it as arbitrary barriers to entry, discrimination on the basis of race, gender, creed, caste, educational credentials, etc. is (partially) applicable only to North America. Yet, you can open any economics textbook, and you would hardly ever find the discussion of an immense area of universally occurring economic activity that is meant to impede, deny, put under control, impose a tribute, destroy, dispossess, mislead, falsify, enslave, or kill. I am convinced that without understanding envy no intelligent discussion of the Communist system is possible. The strong emotions, twisted worldview, perverted rationale, willingness to kill others and to sacrifice oneself these are the traits that manifest themselves both in an envious person and in the Communist regime, and this is not a coincidence.
Finally, there is a highly questionable assumption that all human societies, whatever the stage of their cultural and historic development, yearn for democracy and can readily see its advantages. I disagree with that. It does not mean that I see democracy as bad: it simply means that there are good things for which some people may not be ready (I am not ready to pilot a jet), and there are people who are unaware that certain good things would be good for them (my daughter is not convinced that studying math will do her any good). Thus, I formulated the three themes I wanted to explore:
1. Causes for the (destructive and self-destructive) attractiveness of Communism
2. Envy and its connection to Communism
3. What is democracy and what makes a society accept (or reject) it.
I started writing this book in 1984 and over these 18 long years, the book got shorter and sharper: it respects your time.
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