I grew up in Hungary where the socialist leadership (it is a very interesting fact how much they avoided the word communism and used socialism everywhere but I digress) was hell bent on continuously raising the standard of living because Janos Kadar was afraid of another revolution. (As his deranged last speech in 1989 revealed, he had nightmares for decades of his comrade, Imre Nagy, the prime minister in 1956, whom he betrayed in 1956 and executed in 1957.)

So we didn't have breadlines and politically charged prison sentences were long gone. Even Miklos Haraszti in 1973 only got a suspended eight months sentence for his book -- twenty years before he would've been executed for it, ten years before it would've been a several years non-suspended sentence. And I was a kid in the 80s which was even milder.

But what I do remember is the hopelessness in the shadows of the prefabricated giant concrete buildings. That there's nothing exciting in the future, that we have no choice in our life that no matter what we do, we will live and die in those meagre surroundings. I have, from the age of 10, every afternoon spent a few hours on extra mathematics so that I can get into an elite school so that I can get into a Western university once I am 18. This was not something my parents hammered into me, this was something I wanted to do, desperately so. I remember telling my mother when I was 9 that I wanted to commit suicide which of course she didn't take seriously and then I made this plan to escape.

I did get into the high school I wanted at 14 but my English wasn't good enough to get into MIT when I was 18 but that was not too bad because by 1993 of course that regime was over and there was hope again. Which, for me, was crushed in 2006 and I filed for a Canadian immigration visa and moved there in 2008.