The initial book that radicalized me as a early teenager was reading Victor Malarek’s “The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade” precisely on the massive wave of human trafficking that arose from the former USSR and Eastern Europe through the economic genocide enacted on the former Socialist peoples.

The work was such a categorical denunciation of the living conditions of that region since the 90s, not through any ideologically-inclined argument but through its coverage of this atrocity that it was impossible for me to ever accept afterwards that the collapse of the “enemy” system was a “good thing” worth celebrating. At that point, it didn’t matter how many redditors came up to me with their “my friend’s neighbor’s grand-uncle had a bad time under communism” bit and the libertarian emphasis on legalizing the sex trade alienated me at a fundamental level from those groups as well, even before I remotely touched any theory or met any comrade groups.