I am in one of the ex-USSR Republics, and this week I was at a high meeting where one of the Ministers excoriated all the Ministry leadership around the country for supposed bad work.  Their work is actually very good, but saying that is not the management style.  These managers will have to work all weekend to correct their "errors" and then go back to their own staffs and terrorize and reprimand the latter as well. 

A member of the top-layer's party asked to speak for "3 minutes" after this hours-long harangue, and held us there instead for fifteen.  His first question was the initial manipulation, how many of us were *not* members of the omnipotent ruling Party?  

Few dared acknowledge such an apparently shameful thing, and he soon tossed us another manipulation nugget by saying that today we might have one particular job, but since almost all of us were Party members, we could also go do remunerative party work at any time as well.  So it was a valuable job qualification, like getting a professional degree.  He explained he had formed a Committtee of Party Control, and that as part of the important effort, we shouldn't enjoy ourselves in public.  No disco, no drinking, no dinners, none of that sort of thing -- otherwise, the Party and the top leadership would suffer disrepute by our bad example.  So we had a heavy responsibility.

This has to be what a Soviet government conference used to be like (or Iraq under Saddam).  You need to be a Party member or else you disgrace yourself and go nowhere, and if you are a Party member, that means no fun for you.   All entirely two-faced, of course, because you just *know* this devil got trashed on vodka in the evening.  Anyhow, the Minister then took another 20 minutes to say that the above were all such good points and paraphrase each one, and that we indeed mustn't go on dates or anything, this time for the reason that government service was such a high honor.  The Minister sought his approval of  this parroting, and he gave it with a sense of gravity and never-quite-complete-satisfaction.  After all, there were always more things we could do to strengten the Party and its important Committee On Party Control.  I realized that some of the abuse the Minister had copiously heaped on the senior staff was for this usurper's benefit.

Thought I'd share the above, as you don't get to witness this totalitarianist atavism every day.