"Lenin's Tomb" by David Remnick page 235

The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.

I just read about the coal strikes in the summer of 1989. "It started when a group of miners in the Siberian town of Mezhdurechenk walked off the job at the Shovikovo mine, lead by their shift leader, Valery Kokorin." The reason is suprising...in spite of horrible equipment, dangerous miserable work, bad food and clothes, paltry living conditions, the real issue for these miners was soap. They didn't have soap and could never get clean of the black dust.

As I read this, I wondered about a government, and a system that so dishonors people as human beings that it can't provide something as basic as soap.