My grandmother was a doctor who made house calls early in her career. When Stalin died, she and all the other doctors were summoned to the hospital and required to openly and publicly weep for the great man taken from a great nation.
Nine months later, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s atrocities and laid them before the world, she was summoned again, this time to denounce those same crimes publicly before her peers and superiors.
No mention of what had been demanded of her months earlier. No admission of the hypocrisy. Just the machinery of a broken system, spinning ever more complicated "truths."
My grandmother told this story to underscore just how public the humiliation of everyday life was. There was no individual, only a collective. The communist party deliberately stripped away a person's character. This example wasn’t a Maoist struggle session, but it was cut from the same cloth.
One of the first things my dad noticed and loved about America was that work was simply about the work. No one pried into your life outside the job, no one policed your beliefs, no one cared how you voted, or what your hobbies were. You showed up to do the job you were hired to do, and were judged only on whether or not you did it well. What a relief!