The Road to Freedom: Estonia's Rise from Soviet Vassal State to One of the Freest Nations on Earth

Estonia is a testament to the productive and ennobling power of freedom. After waves of successive invasions from East and West, the small and fledgling country on the Baltic Sea was dragooned into the Soviet Union in 1940. There its people, about 1 million in total, were trapped for five decades as unwilling subjects of the socialist experiment. The experiment proved a failure. Rather than equality and prosperity, traditional socialism generated just the sort of economic and social maladies that Marx had predicted for capitalism: economic stagnation, recurrent crises, material and social inequality, environmental exploitation, political repression, and worker alienation.