Some broad-brush comments on politics/economics. In my opinion, North Korea is the only real communist country today (In college, the professors called it an autarky). It seems to me China and Vietnam are communist in name only. There is a lot of anti-China sentiment under Trump, but I think one-worlders are right that globalization has been a net positive. It has lifted a lot of developing-country people out of poverty, and made consumer items cheaper in the West. Of course there are trade-offs in auto factories in Michigan, steel plants in the Midwest, and textile operations in the Carolinas.
I was working for a media/publishing company in the 1990s. One of its main focuses was on the oil and gas sector in the former Soviet Union as that region adjusted to capitalism. Russia and other countries there shifted petroleum and other mineral assets from state control to a few oligarchs. It seemed like they went from Soviet corruption and inefficiency to crony capitalist corruption. “Meet the new boss…”
I’m old enough that we were still studying the Soviet political system in college, and I read the Communist Manifesto when young. It seems to me that the communists had some noble objectives: eliminating gross wealth/income disparities and “de-biologizing history” as someone put it. But it was impractical. I stayed with relatives of a friend in one of the former Eastern-bloc countries in the early 1990s. The paterfamilias was a medical doctor who said under the communists he had an official job but made most of his living providing black-market treatment.
To me Gorbachev was one of the heroes of the 20th century because he decided it wasn’t worth fighting the West to the death over political and economic ideology. I had a boss who would say sarcastically at the end of a difficult work day: “declare victory and go home.” Gorbachev seemed to accept defeat and then go home.
Update: Got my air con fixed yesterday. Makes a world of difference for sleep.