It was enormously effective. Forty years, in half a dozen countries. Forty years in which the rest of the world saw the Wirtschaftswunder from the ashes of Western Europe and Japan, decolonialization, the end of legally mandated racism in the US (on top of its own post-war economic and population boom). We got party meetings and retransmissions of Vremya on Friday nights. It still worked without anyone (statistically) going to the Kolyma, sunny or otherwise, without the voronki roaming the streets every night.

Even if we can't agree how or why, it's on us to always think about it in the hope it might in some small way prevent it from happening again. In the places that we left or the places we came to.