> I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum
Why such drama with many words, when all can be summed up with that. Yet somehow, people consider life much better on one side of the spectrum, while other side is considered utter shit. So much that many people are risking their lives, and some are dying just to 'move across spectrum'. It may be a hard concept to grok for typical western kids who often struggle with finding noble worthy hard-to-achieve goals in their lives, who got good life served at literal plate without moving a finger, but trust me its damn real.
I've grown up during communism, in country heavily oppressed by soviet russia and littered with many of their military bases, ready for that WWIII battles that never came. Not 'spent some time someplace so I am an expert', my whole identity was only that and nothing else.
Yes we all need to go shopping, its just that my parents couldn't buy any fresh vegetables nor fruits for their son, who suffered mild malnutrition due to that. And sometimes the shelves were empty or full of one type of canned sardines (I mean whole supermarket, nothing else, beauty of constantly failing central planning, unless you were part of regime/communist party).
Yes we all went to some form of school, but I was being brainwashed to be obedient future soldier for absolutely rubbish ideologies. If I would say something bad about regime even with utmost innocence of a small kid, my parents could easily end up in jail, lives ruined, even distant family torn apart for good.
Yes we all could travel, its just that I could not travel even within different communist countries, not without regime's special approval stamp in passport. Neutral, or god forbid proper western countries were off limits, unreachable, you would be shot on sight on the border, or torn apart by dogs.
And so on and on. Yeah, its just a spectrum, what a joke.
Well here in the West we were also sent to some kind of school to be brainwashed to be obedient soldiers for rubbish ideologies, so we have that in common
Heh, what country are you from? What time period are you talking about? Is it your lived experience or the second-hand memory?
I lived in Bulgaria & Czechoslovakia in 70's and 80's, and my memories are quite different than yours.
You can buy fresh vegetables and fruits (in-season, local, not shipped from Peru) & dairy products & bread & eggs as much as you can afford (and the prices were affordable, stable for a dozen years). Bananas, oranges & other exotic stuff was not available, maybe around Christmas if you had the right information and waited in a long queue. Slightly better but nor really good with better cuts of meat.
I never ever saw empty shelves in shops, not in Bulgaria, not in Czechoslovakia. I am pretty sure of that, because in 1982+- we were on a 'friendly exchange trip' to Kiev (elementary school organized, with a school in Kiev reciprocally coming to us a couple months later) and saw those there, and still remember the shock.
Jeans and such stuff was for kids with connections or family in the west. Few people had cars, mostly skoda/lada/moskvich/wartburg/trabant/polski fiat. Small, very basic shit. Public transport worked, to every little village. Nothing fancy, but functional. You could live without car, not like in USA.
I have never met a soviet soldier in my life at that time, those poor souls were closed-off at military bases and were forbidden getting out (maybe to prevent them seeing than life in Czechoslovakia was so much better than in CCCP).
The education in schools was focused more on math/engineering/hard sciences, and kids of those times had better background in those than the kids growing today, although humanities are another thing. We did not sing the hymn, like they do in USA. Everyone knew those are lies. But a photo of the current leader of the communist party was hanging there. Communist indoctrination was everywhere, you learnt to live with it and filter it out. Unlike the west, where most people still believe the official narratives.
I could see Austria behind the iron fence from the window of my bedroom, seeing the lights of the cars driving there, but thinking I will never see those places in my life.
One afternoon, I saw my younger brother (late elementary school at that time) walking across the field towards the fence, too curious and stupid. Suddenly, from a well-hidden bunker, a couple of guys with rifles and a german shepherd appeared, and escorted him out. No shooting at sigh, no beating, no record of 'dangerous anti-communistic element'.
My uncle, serving as a young conscript at Shumava forest, late 50's (he had no choice about that), on the border between Czechia and Western Germany, got knifed in back by somebody trying to flee to the West. Survived, 2cm from kidneys. Ended up living most of his life (since 1969) in USA.
My mother threw away her communist card, shouting, at the face of the local party committee, with the words 'to hell with such party, when I, a widow with two small kids, have to live in such apartment (small room + small kitchen, dark, a toilet and a kitchen sink with only cold water (no bathroom), small coal stove the only heating). She did not go to jail, eventually we got better apartment (central heating, real bathroom and toiled, hot water).
You know, those are real life anecdotes. Not the propaganda tropes endlessly replicated.
If you were politically active, anti-communist, you lost your engineering/science/arts/whatever fancy job and ended up e.g. as boiler operator of the local heating plant for municipal heating. 50's were wild with several highly-politicized processes ending up in capital punishment (so was McCarthyism in the USA at that time), but 70's and 80's were relatively tame.
In the next class, there was a son of a well-known dissident. Had no problems getting into high-quality high school (merit-based entry exams, mostly math), not sure how would the thing went with the university studies (math/engineering probably OK, law/philosophy probably not), but the fall of communism came.
There was widespread small-scale stealing from the state ('if you are not stealing from the state, you are stealing from the family'), although the real large-scale looting came after the fall of the communism.
I think your view is a tad optimistic. Many people had difficult lives just because they didn’t want to be members of the party. Thier kids didn’t get to good schools, or got to the one 30 minutes by train, they lost jobs and were forced to dry laundry with engineering degrees.
There was even a joke about this:
⸻
In Poland, during the times of hard socialism, a math associate professor calculated that a shipyard worker earned three times more than he did. So he thought “screw this,” crossed out the titles before and after his name, and went to work in a factory.
Of course, he was doing well in the factory — he didn’t strain himself too much and earned three times more than at the school. Then the factory introduced an evening school for workers, with the promise that whoever attended would get a raise. So the associate professor signed up and started going.
On the very first lesson — bam — mathematics. The level was like the first year of high school, so the associate professor was just dozing off, not paying attention. The teacher noticed him, called him up to the board, and asked him to calculate the area of a circle.
The professor started writing, but for the life of him couldn’t remember the formula for the area of a circle. So he decided to derive it. He wrote the conversion to polar coordinates, then integrated it, and ended up with –πr². So he stood there, wondering where the minus sign had come from.
And from the back row, someone whispered: “Reverse the integration interval.”
⸻
Also, behold, people queueing for toilet paper in 88 in Czechoslovakia: https://youtu.be/O6qUqFy2FEU
I live near a port and dock workers there make a quarter of a million dollars a year along with great benefits, meanwhile the majority of professors these days are adjuncts who aren't even university employees lol
>were forced to dry laundry with engineering degrees.
This sort of thing is happening in the states. Maybe we're the commies now.
1) maybe it was different in 50's, 60's, when I was around, plenty of profs at the university were non-communists in 1989. The communists as a percentage of working population was always low (<11%?), so what you suggest could not have been a generally applied rule, the math just does not work. I assume if you wanted to get to a leading position in a plant/office/university, you needed to be communist. If you refused, that typically meant no promotion. You must have really pissed off the local party boss if it came to your kids could not get to good school. Never a smart move. Probably not a smart move to piss off Irwings if you live in New Brunswick, Canada, either.
2) jokes are jokes, exxagerating a kernel of truth to the point of absurdity is what makes the joke. The truth is, the salary of prof was never anything special, but was marginally better than the salary of average worker. There were some highly (i.e. 2x, maybe even 3x?, salary scales overall were really flat) paid worker occupations, miners were one of them (maybe due to work hazard). The way to get the luxuries was not through money, but through connections (yes, mostly communistic ones).
3) shit happens (the accompanying text talks about a fire in the main/only paper-mill making toilet paper in Czechoslovakia), there were queues when the rumor spread 'there will be bananas in the local fruit&vegetables shop'. There were people panic buying toilet paper at the start of COVID also, maybe its a local specialty :-)
One anecdote I remember from my youth was people routinely taking their windshield wipers off when parking somewhere out (those were notoriously in short supply and easy to steal). So yes, there were supply problems, no rose glasses, but nothing extreme.
As with everything, there is too much polarization: some people remember only the bad stuff and it was a hell on earth for them, others remember only the good stuff and emphasize that. As always, the truth is in between.
>There were people panic buying toilet paper at the start of COVID also, maybe its a local specialty :-)
Not exactly. Australians did exactly the same thing. There were people who bought ridiculous amounts of toilet paper and stored stacks of it in their garage and other people missed out, causing massive demand vs. supply problems for a extreme future outcome that never occurred. It's the selfish-survivalist greed of individual humanity en-masse.
The same thing happens occasionally with petrol, unexpected demand for fear of missing our creates the supply problem. At extremes if it happens with banks, the run on banks mean the bank collapses because it's over-leveraged and can't give back everyone their savings because those savings have been lent but not repaid yet.
So a supposed long-term democratic capitalist society (Australia) behaved the same as the post-past-forced-dictated-communist society of former Czechoslovakia (now Czechia.
I think when humans get - it just occurs in different ways based on the local envioronment/scarcity/society and your version of brainwashing of your local upbringing. How many of us consider propoganda from the inside looking out (hard to identify) vs. taking an 'outside looking in' perspective? It's way easier to shit on North Korea than your local/national government. You have constantly shift your thinking in questioning your local news as much as non-local news.
Anecdotally, the recently voted #1 Australian song of all time music video was filmed there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIBv2GEnXlc, and one of my favourite footballers ever was Czech, so I may be biased. I really Prague when I visited, aside from the tacky tourist strip near the river on the non-castle side.
Too late to edit after a late post-proofread I got distracted by the ICFP2025.
>I really Prague
I really liked Prague... except for the tourist stretch on the non-castle side of the river which way tacky. We have our own tacky shops where I'm from, they're just not all together in a long continuous span.
>Unlike the west, where most people still believe the official narratives.
Tell me what these narratives are. I do not disagree, but I am a westerner who never left home.
We (the west) are the force of good, spreading democracy and freedom around the world.
And our socio-economic system is the best there can be, don't even think about changing anything about it (questioning this is a total taboo).
That's not even the official narrative. The official narrative, is that we the West have a democracy by historic accident and bring war and slavery to the rest of the world seeking for cheap oil and other resources. But this is fine, because if we wouldn't extort them someone else would. And of course everyone is free to choose their situation, so they could just leave. But please don't become an immigrant here, because then you take our taxes and pensions, because we don't allow you to work, because then you would eventually get voting rights. But all these problems are far away and actually only the concern of their countries, we have no part in it, we just do our big money game.
The people distrusting the official narrative, think that we don't actually live in a democracy an there is an elite in power who just keeps this as there facade.
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yet, many people claim they were happier back then. At least in the country where I’m from. No options in life, no hard decisions or responsibility for their lives. Our current PM said he didn’t notice the fall of communism. shrug