Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. S everal years ago, I did some lecturing at a university in Moscow. One of my Russian colleagues had been involved in the dissident student movement in the 1980s, and talked a lot about how bad the regime was and how much most people hated it. I was curious about how, if it was so unpopular, the Soviet system managed to survive for so long. “Brute force?” I asked. “No,” he said, “it was the