Another chapter, another banger! What I found particularly interesting was the overview of the four major periods of the soviet economy up to that point. Describing how intellectuals at first sabotaged the development of the first Five Year Plan is something we can see across all socialist economies, and it's something we have to understand. We cannot simply kill them all off, we need their skills, but we can punish the sabateurs while winning over this substratum of the working classes gradually.

Seeing the people as the dictators is something I think Marxists can usually grasp intellectually, but translating that to non-Marxists doesn't always land. Again, Anna Louise Strong does an extraordinary job of simplifying the concepts and using analogies and anecdotes to convey exactly how this works.