It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.

When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.

Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. Worst and probably intractable was the fact that people who had spent their lives securing power and individual leverage were expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively...