Econ Talk listeners know I've talked about in great depth which is in the first circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It's a story of what happened to intellectuals, scientists, mathematicians and engineers who were put to work in the name of improving the tyrannical and authoritarian powers of Stalin. You don't really unless you have friends who live there who told you about it just to say yeah it was horrible or people were afraid or you know it was kind of corrupt because rewards weren't handed out in a decentralized way. The day to day texture of how decisions were made teaches something you can't really appreciate without that fuller picture.