"[Stalin leads] as luxurious a mode of life as this old Bolshevik sees fit to enjoy. He, the rest of the Politburo and a few other government leaders have made of the Kremlin a city within a city, packed with comforts and surrounded by bayonets. Inside its walls are comfortable, warm, handsomely furnished apartments. (Most Russian city dwellers live one family, or sometimes two or three, to a single room.) There are special shops for residents only, overflowing with meat, canned delicacies, fresh fruit at all seasons, wines, chocolates. (Most Russians have lived for the past six years on 500 grams of bread a day, one pound of fats and one pound of sugar a month.) The wives of the Kremlin have their own dressmakers and, like the old slave-owning nobility, heap abuse on the poor designers who fail to create flattering styles for their fat and aging figures. (The average Moscow woman rarely sees one new dress a year.) Special schools for Kremlin children, special medical and dental care for their parents, special laxness regarding moral standards - these are obvious concomitants of the private life of Russia's new ruling class.... They had acquired a conviction of superiority over the rest of the people. 'It is not for minds like yours to decide - the Kremlin knows what it is doing.'"
