One Great Read

 

I'm over half way through this one, and it's quite the page turner.  It's the story of a British spy all alone in Bolshevik St. Petersburg, and the efforts made by MI6 to safely retrieve him before he's caught by the Cheka.

Interesting tidbit.  The city of St. Petersburg is basically starving because of the Bolshevik's communist policies, but the peasants in the nearby countryside are daily attempting to enter the city to sell food.  In spite of the near famine, the secret police make every effort to arrest them, steal their food, and sell it themselves.

The lesson is that the hated capitalism is right there to solve the food problem, and is attempting to do so through the operation of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, while the Bolsheviks work against it both ideologically and practically, while corruptly taking advantage themselves.  Proving, in the process, that their socialist creed is false, and they themselves are nothing better than thieves.

Not what Karl Marx would have predicted.  Given the constant example of situations like this over the decades, and the economic lessons imparted if only people would listen, it is shocking to hear people even today rail against capitalism, and yearn for the socialist yoke.