At some point in the late eighties my father became disillusioned in communism (basically, seeing people fleeing east germany instead of the other way round).

At some point in the late eighties my father became disillusioned in communism (basically, seeing people fleeing east germany instead of the other way round). Then he read quite a lot on the subject, and read Orwell and everything. He never became a full-fledged pro-capitalist, but he was very skeptical of socialism. I remember stories during my childhood about how bad and un-free the USSR was, since policemen could "ask your papers" on the street, and the government could act arbitrarily against its own citizens. Thus I grew up hearing a lot of such horrifying stories. Admittedly, I didn't pay too much attention to these stories, but none of them seemed at the time so horrifying as the stuff that I read today about the U.S.A.