Reading an essay by Jewish-American author Dmitri Orlov, a man born in the Soviet Union who then migrated to the United States, I was intrigued by his use of the phrase "collapse" to refer to the end of the Soviet era. Indeed, as do many other leftish thinkers, Orlov tends to speak of the "collapse of communism" rather than of the Russian people's painful recovery from it.
Socialist semantics - calling a recovery a collapse - has left a great imprint on the Western public's understanding of what communism really was, and is, namely: a state of economic panic. Communism occurs when economies die. It is a catatonic state of society in which the state body must attempt to keep its brain and its heart alive by letting its limbs die off.
