In August 1978, while visiting the Soviet Union, I decided to take the local train from Moscow to Vladimir, the capital of a former princedom some 100 miles to the east.
At Moscow's Kursk station, a rather disheveled man in his mid-30s boarded the crowded car and proceeded to address his fellow riders. "Comrades," he began, "would you help me?" He then went on to relate how, as an epileptic, he could find no steady work and was surviving on a pension of a mere 25 rubles a...