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"One particularly endearing feature of Russian society is the way that children are loved and pampered. The best way to get a taxi in any big city—a considerable undertaking—is to stand on the street with a child. Cabs that ordinarily rush by even when they are empty will always stop for a child. In general, Russians remain an emotional, demonstrative and generous people who are a pleasure to live among."
Perhaps the most significant improvement in the quality of Soviet life is scarcely ever mentioned, least of all by top party officials. Exactly 20 years ago this month, at the 20th Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his celebrated de-Stalinization speech that heralded the end of the vast "Gulag Archipelago" of concentration camps in which Stalin imprisoned at least 12 million people every year. Today, perhaps 10,000 people are still being held in Soviet prisons, camps or police-run psychiatric hospitals because their political or religious views are regarded as dangerous to the state. But notable dissidents are now more likely to be exiled than jailed. Some, like Sakharov, survive within the Soviet Union, openly challenging and embarrassing the Kremlin inquisitors.
Ivan Ivanovich may be indifferent to Sakharov's insistent calls for greater freedom in the Soviet Union. He does care, however, that his material well-being is improving, however erratically, and that he has far less to fear from the arbitrary midnight knock on the door And that is no small blessing.
* In Soviet hagiography the First Party Congress is reckoned to be an abortive 1898 meeting in Minsk of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which later split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.