In 1982, Hans Magnus Enzensberger proposed an ironic hypothesis about "underdevelopment as the highest stage of socialism." He was referring to communism, nothing like the social democracy championed by New York's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani. A few years after Enzensberger's insightful observation, the joke was over: in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Finally, East Germans, and after them the citizens of all the Soviet republics, could escape the prison that a communist world marked by scarcity, bureaucracy, terror, waste, disinformation, and an inability to innovate had become. Nothing worked; everyone was working for themselves. It was the end of totalitarian societies that, through terror, had guaranteed themselves fanatical support or passive loyalty. The fall of communism seemed definitive and total. But history is never linear.

"In 1925, when I went to Russia, I knew about that country about what everyone else knows: practically nothing," he said, with his usual mischievousness, Josep Pla (Palafrugell, 1897 - Llofriu, 1981). He wrote it in the text that heads the expanded and revised edition of one of his first books, Russia. News from the USSR (Diana Editions, 1925), in The North, the fifth volume of the complete works of Destino. In The North, which is preceded by two essential travel books to understand the young Josep Pla, Letters from afar and Letters from further away, that collection of chronicles for the newspaper Advertising has been transformed into Trip to Russia in 1925 and includes a long preamble written from Mas Pla, in Llofriu, at the beginning of 1967, in which the author confronts that "youthful crouch" with his mature vision: "This book is a lovingly simple outline of a construction: the walls and the squares of a wall and the facts are the doubts of whether they fall on them."