Somewhere at the beginning of the book Gulag Archipelago, there is a short but strong sentence: not a single good man will remain. In the world of limited possibilities, strict government controls and inability to thrive, stealing was a common survival tactics. The top Party elite would get all the benefits, best properties, best goods and services, sometimes impossible to express in the common Western manner, by using price in monetary units. Those privileges were not for sale, those were priceless acts of gratitude.

Not everyone was so fortunate as to understand at the age of fourteen, as did Vanya Levitsky: “Every honest man is sure to go to prison. Right now my papa is serving time, and when I grow up they’ll put me in too.” (They put him in when he was twenty-three years old.)