Totalitarianism doesn’t always come wearing jackboots. It can curl its malign tendrils around us without massed parades, torture chambers, or firing squads.

During the Cold War, most Warsaw Pact states bore only a mild resemblance to George Orwell’s Oceania. They were altogether more banal, more tawdry, more sordid. Yes, they depended on police informers and, yes, only one party was allowed to win elections. But, by the 1970s, quite a lot of normal life had reasserted itself. There were shops and underground punk bands and sports teams and even limited foreign travel.