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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

Life in Warsaw Pact countries was not bad.

Nobody lacked a roof or job or something to eat post ww2. Social stability was huge, criminality insanely low, lack of market economy didn't made people obsessed to work themselves to buy useless things one after the other.

The situation really got bad by the mid 70s when the gap with western neighbors started increasing and a wind of social and political change hit most of the countries in the pact.

But comments like yours make it sound as if people were sleeping in tents or trailers on Moscow's roads.

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>> Life in Warsaw Pact countries was not bad.

Did you live there? I did.

- Electricity rationed: we had maybe 3-4 days per week and mostly evenings and in winter. We lived in a medium sized city. Plenty of villages had no electricity whatsoever.

- Food rationed: You could buy meat twice a week. Bread? Once ever two days. We were lucky we lived close to nature so collecting mushrooms and fishing filled the gaps.

- Hot water rationed: You can get used to cold showers, I guess.

- Ethnic minorities were viewed as vermin (we were one).

- More and more school subjects were thought not in your mother's tongue.

- Roof? Sure we had.

- Lack of market economy? We had "illegal" movies, "illegal" rock music and some "illegal" western tech. There was a thriving black market economy.

- Your phone was constantly taped and listened on.

- You were afraid who you talked to, were afraid of your friends because they could be informants.

- Criminality low? Maybe in one aspect but corruption was through the roof. You wanted something? Bribe someone.

- There was also a pandemic of alcoholism and violent men towards their wives. My father and 3 of my 5 uncles were part of this statistic. So were thousands of others.

But yeah, life was "not bad".

The point is that rather than looking with curiosity at what life was actually like it is common for, say, a Brit or an American to picture a mental image of the most deprived community in a given Warsaw Pact country and project that over the entire region.

Like it’s not helpful to pretend that it was a utopia like some “tankies” insist on doing (they’re brain-broken). But it’s equally unhelpful to construct the fantasy that ČSSR was like a real-life Mordor-like state, yet many (not you) insist on doing so.

edit - Downvoted for suggesting we shouldn't just rely on lazy stereotypes. Folks, we love to see it.

I grew up in a eastern bloc country, and what the GP says is spot-on. This is not stereotyping, this is how it was. I still have nightmares about queueing for cheese alone as a little boy (my grandma was queueing somewhere else for soy-based meat substitute) and getting shoved around by angry people that were desperate to get some produce before it ended - cause the supply was always less then the number of the people in the queue. Imagine waiting hours for the truck to arrive with cheese and it finishes just in front of you.

Yeah someone I knew in university was so hard up and malnourished he contracted scurvy. Therefore surely that is what life is like for everyone in the UK - just an entire nation of people living on the breadline with preventable diseases.

You see what I mean, right? Like it's horrific that diseases from antiquity reared their head in a supposedly developed nation. But at the same time, that doesn't exactly tell the story of modern day UK and it'd be very dishonest to suggest that reflects the entirety of the (then) European Union.

In the same way it's horrific that you had childhood trauma that persists to this day. You're under no obligation to defend the circumstances in which you grew up, but I'm sure you're quite aware that your experience was far from universal, as evidenced by comments here.

My experience was universal where I grew up. Everybody in my generation had it. Stop being so presumptuous

The issue in question here is that many in the west will unquestioningly accept an account of true hardship and just presume that this was the case for every one of hundreds of millions of people across an enormous bloc of countries. You don't seem keen to volunteer where you're from or what period you're talking about and I won't press you on that, but from speaking to guys I know from ČSSR, Poland or Yugoslavia your experience sounds really rough but not reflective of theirs.

It's not presumptuous at all to say your experience of lining up for food, feeling scared and having lingering trauma about that is not reflective of the bloc overall. It is certainly an important part of it that should not be minimised (and tbh should be carefully considered so that it isn't repeated). But it is not reflective of every lived experience in the group of countries in question and, again, you know this.

> Did you live there? I did.

Yes.

- Never had electricity rationed.

- Meat was rationed on a food stamp basis here as well. What should've been the alternative? Only a handful of wealthier people could eat meat? Meat production has always been a problem in eastern Europe and only improved with market economy.

- Never seen hot water rationed

- I don't think racism is a peculiarity of socialist countries. Slavs have always been a culturally xenophobic culture, still are.

- Yes, I'm aware of black market economy.

- Your communications are still constantly taped and listened on unless you're naive to think the opposite.

- Never my family was afraid of who we talked to. Moreover, what was to be afraid of, unless you were plotting something?

- Corruption is still widespread everywhere in the world, not a peculiarity of socialism per se.

- Alcohol-related issues are worse today than they were in soviet times in most of the countries formerly in the warsaw pact.

> But yeah, life was "not bad".

People use to paint those countries as miserable or something, which is straight not true. Most people enjoyed on average the highest standards of living they or their parents ever seen. Cities, infrastructure were built everywhere, women enjoyed the most social progress they'd ever seen, politics, while limited to only communist parties still had seen the most democratization these countries ever experienced.

You are claiming multiple things that are just plain false. Some of these countries were full democracies before they became Moscow's satellites. The amount of censorship and self-censorship was staggering. And no, your communication today is not constantly taped and listened to in most of Europe.

You are either a Russian troll, someone with an undisclosed agenda, or a naive 13 y/o. The things you're saying are a mix of straight up lies and misdirection and a classic example of historical revisionism that should be called out everywhere we see it.

Concrete points:

- I don't think racism is a peculiarity of socialist countries. Slavs have always been a culturally xenophobic culture, still are.

This is racist bullshit - "slavs" are not inherently xenophobic. 30-40 years of progress just didn't happen in Central Europe because Moscow didn't like big social changes.

- Your communications are still constantly taped and listened on unless you're naive to think the opposite.

Not in the same way, and I have a feeling you know that.

- Never my family was afraid of who we talked to. Moreover, what was to be afraid of, unless you were plotting something?

Being careful about who you talk to about what is literally the thing most people remember right after "we couldn't travel." If you didn't feel this, you were either a small child, politically aligned with the party, or extremely sheltered.

Agreed. Three things that stood out:

- "You had nothing to fear unless you were plotting something": someone overhearing mild criticism or a politically charged joke was enough to ruin lives, get yourself or relatives kicked out of universities, lose jobs, homes, and so forth. It's impossible to describe living a day after day for decades under that constant anxiety to a person who has always had the freedom to say whatever they want. Even rural potato farmers knew to keep their mouths shut unless they were in a circle of people they trusted.

- "Alcoholism is worse now": oh god no. For starters, it was socially acceptable to drink and be drunk at work, even if you worked with heavy equipment (farms, factories). If you caused an accident, then being drunk was a valid excuse and lessened the punishment.

- "Corruption is widespread everywhere": given the contant shortage of goods, everyone in positions of power always had the attitude of "what's there in it for me?". Everywhere you went to ask for something, be it officials, nurses, dentists or teachers, had the expectation of getting something in return. The whole society ran like a giant "one red paperclip" experiment, with people constantly exchanging bribes and favors and looking for best deals for themselves without any regard for laws and fairness.

> You are either a Russian troll, someone with an undisclosed agenda, or a naive 13 y/o.

Woah, the personal attack because someone has a different opinion and had a different experience than you.

My family never had it bad during communism, still they didn't love it and large parts of my family emigrated to western Europe between the 70s and 80s.

But that doesn't make socialist countries the miserable dystopias you paint, that was just never our experience.

The reason why parts of my family emigrated is simply because life in western Europe was more comfortable and enjoyed more freedom (of movement especially).

If anything it seems that _you_ are the one spewing falsehood.

I suspect part of the reason for the incorrect (in general) things you say is that you seem to be german from your profile, and yes, Eastern Germany was way more controlled and the epicenter of the things you describe. But cross the border to Poland, Yugoslavia or Ukraine and none of the things you describe were anywhere part of the average person's life.

> But comments like yours make it sound as if people were sleeping in tents or trailers on Moscow's roads.

That's not the type of misery I thinks of when the USSR comes up — the gulags, the secret police, the inability to leave, the propaganda, not the housing.

(Also the pre-war disasters like the Holomodor, as while you did exclude that by saying post-war and Warsaw Pact, the preceding comment said "Soviet").

> the gulags, the secret police, the inability to leave, the propaganda

I mean, bear in mind that some of that stuff is coming back; note the very high rate of careless opposition politicians and journalists falling out windows, and so on.

As far as I know, the gulags never went away[1]. The secret police's status, by its very nature, is unknown.

[1]: https://www.economist.com/europe/2013/10/19/slave-labour-and...

Like neutrinos, secret police can't be directly observed, but their presence can be inferred by their effect on their surroundings, for instance, as mentioned, people being very careless around windows.

All that was very real and yet, by its very nature, applied only to some people and it was possible - indeed, mandatory - to not think about it in daily life. The overall effect was a sort of adequately comfortable open prison, while a lot of people saw improvements in their material condition over their lives. As in China.

It also had a certain structure to the misery, which is now replaced by arbitrary brutality both from the state and organized crime.

It is a documented fact that Russian life expectancy dropped immediately after the fall of the USSR. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41294-021-00169-w ; "Male life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by six years between 1991 and 1994, from an already-low 63.4 years to 57.4 years over that period, an almost unprecedented decrease in life expectancy in three years"

They have a chart on which you can see how the recovery corresponds roughly to how successfully post-Soviet states managed to "westernize". Estonia did well. Ukraine has only just recovered to Soviet levels.

In summary: western life expectancy good, Soviet life expectancy adequate, third state of collapse autocracy/anarchy in the middle very bad.

Right, and most of the footage of Russians being miserable that we are familiar with is from after the introduction of “shock therapy” (ie during the ruthless, sudden introduction of capitalism).

This is always a hard topic to discuss with those not exposed to any life in former Warsaw pact countries. Because there’s a chance they’ll ignore what you say about the day-to-day life of your average person there (and how it was largely ok if often a bit poorer than much of the west), and assume you’re trying to say “communism and everything that came with it was perfect”.

Not that you'd have been allowed to film Russians being miserable beforehand; don't forget the 1932 Pulitzer/Holomodor controversy.

There's probably a whole field of study in what went wrong with the airdropping of "capitalism" and "democracy" into both post-Soviet states and Afghanistan. It clearly missed a number of elements which were required for those plans to work, mostly around trust and rule of law but also around class and small-l liberalism. Somehow these were more easily overcome the closer (geographically) the country was to core Europe. Then there's the semi-democratic not-very-liberal outcomes of Poland and Hungary thirty years on.

There is plenty of documentary footage available of life in the USSR and in the Warsaw pact countries. It’s just most people won’t have seen it because it’s rarely that interesting, it doesn’t portray some dystopian nightmarish hellworld[0] (nor a communist utopia), it’s largely just sort of mundane, ordinary and familiar. What I saw of Czechoslovakia, for example, looked not dissimilar to much of the UK.

Maybe I look like I'm going to bat for the former regimes in these countries but I promise I'm not. It's a really interesting topic and while I can understand if those who lived during this time wouldn't want to relive it, I also wish it wasn't just lazily dismissed using stereotypes by much of the rest of the world (you're not included in that, you seem to have some interest and knowledge on it)

[0] - yes there was KGB/StB/stasi, suppression of opposition and other brutal things. I was in a former secret police prison just this weekend so I’m keenly aware of that.

I enjoyed your comments on this thread, thanks for sharing your perspective.

This taps a bit on “change is bad” as well — people react very negatively to big changes, especially as they age. Suicide rate for example went up shortly after the end of socialism in Hungary.

> It is a documented fact that Russian life expectancy dropped immediately after the fall of the USSR.

I used to work with some Russian insurers maany years ago. What they told me is that they believed life expectancy hasn't changed much, but that the Soviet data was massaged to present a better picture.

Later on, the quality of the data dropped, due to general chaos, so insurers swapped to using the massaged Soviet tables - figuring that the magnitude of massaging is comparable to the improvements in life expectancy since fall of USSR.

This is believable. I think Japan had a problem where they tried to present an award to the world's oldest person only to discover that she'd been dead for years .. and so had the second oldest. Widespread pension fraud.

> That's not the type of misery I thinks of when the USSR comes up — the gulags, the secret police, the inability to leave, the propaganda, not the housing.

Those were absolutely non-issues for anyone but a small minority of people.

Movement limitation, which varied in time, is the only thing that applied to a much larger subset of people. It required quite some bureaucracy to travel.

Gonna give you an example: people that were members of the communist party enjoyed an easier time from this point of view. Everyone could join the party by the way, but it was generally unpopular. In Poland I think, e.g., despite the advantages of being a party member, at its peak only few millions were part of it.

You do realise you’re saying “when I think of the worst aspects of a country, I am not thinking about the better parts of them”

Not trying to “whatabout” you here but you could construct a similarly dystopian view of most countries by only focusing on the grimmer parts of life there. In the USA this would involve school shootings, lack of affordable healthcare and housing, poor/forgotten areas, increased threat of violence from the police and the far right. If you focussed on those without any of the most positive aspects (freedom of speech as a constitutional right, good healthcare/education once you break into middle class, realistic possibility of becoming relatively well off, freedom of movement, gender and racial equality on paper) you’d think the country was pretty miserable too.

Again, this is not an attempt at a whataboutist change of subject, rather an invitation to reflect on what you’re saying.

There absolutely were paupers, starvation, misery and crime in the Soviet Union and other eastern block countries throughout the 20th century.

> The situation really got bad by the mid 70s when the gap with western neighbors started increasing and a wind of social and political change hit most of the countries in the pact.

Yeah, but there was an entire generation that grew up post-70s. Post-war Europe was just focused on rebuilding, and the centrally planned economies did an OK job, but after Prague Spring things got progressively worse and worse.

You are wrong that people had access to cheap housing and basic goods. While, yes, it was a much better material living standard than third world countries, families with two kids still had to be crammed into tiny one bedroom apartments and considered themselves lucky. Those big grey blocky buildings? You waited 30 years to get an apartment in one of those. You waited 5 years for a car.

It wasn't great. People had enough to eat, and heat in the winter and the streets were safe, but not much more than that. And while you didn't "hussle" to get ahead, you had to do a lot of political maneuvering to get ahead, which probably worked out to be about as stressful.

I think your revisionist view of history is as dangerous as the people responding to you saying the opposite. We should be clear that this way of running a society is thoroughly discredited. Was it the worst place to live? No. Social progress was even made, as you point out. But it was much, much worse than than you seem to imply.

>But comments like yours make it sound as if people were sleeping in tents or trailers on Moscow's roads.

Being unemployed was illegal.

And the 70s are only a decade from when the gulags were closed.

Maybe in some Warsaw Pact countries, but not in the USSR (where Russia was one of the SSRs).

> Life in Warsaw Pact countries was not bad.

Talk to the millions of Romanians that were incarcerated during the 50s in Communist Camps, thousands died in these Camps. Some were political people from the past, militaries, priests, teachers, students, some were just regular people unwilling to give their land to the state.

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