WHEN SOKOLOV HAD been a little boy growing up in the Soviet Union, he had been exposed to more than a few magazine articles and television programs depicting the misery of life under capitalism. A reporter would travel to some squalid place in Appalachia or the South Bronx and take a few depressing photographs, then jot down, or make up, some equally depressing anecdotes and package it into a story intended to make it clear that people back in the USSR didn’t have it so bad. While no one was stupid enough to take such propaganda at face value, all but the most cynical persons assumed that there was some truth to them. Yes, the standard of living could be higher in the West. Everyone knew this. But it could be lower too.