Rich Uncle Moneybags fights the Commies

From the NY Post book review of “Monopoly – The world’s most famous game and how it got that way’:

During the depths of the Great Depression, suggests Orbanes, playing Monopoly was simultaneously a way of escaping economic privation while aspiring to the power of a Morgan.

That's one of the reasons the Soviet Union outlawed the game until 1987, even though samizdat versions were as popular as Levi's jeans and rock music. It was a way of dissenting from the Kremlin's top-down dictates.

It wasn't an accident that Monopoly was prominently displayed in the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow's Sokolniki Park, made famous as the backdrop of Richard Nixon and Nikita Kruschev's "kitchen debate."

Brezhnev knew that once the Russian people saw that little car it was all over. (HT: Arts & Letters)