Since Stanislaw Lem was mentioned, I’ll give another SF author - the Strugatsky brothers. One of their most famous stories was “Roadside Picnic”, which was made into the movie “Stalker” (and that lately into a video game), though the movie’s rather bleaker than the book. (There was also a recent minor flap over some superficial resemblance to Avatar - they have a planet called Pandora with people known as the Nave). They commonly set their stories in a future communist utopia (in some of the same way Star Trek is like that).
Unfortunately, there are a ton of Soviet-era writers I’ve been meaning to get around to, but haven’t had time yet:
Anything by the Strugratsky brothers - best sci-fi in Russian. From the translated-to-English works - especially “Roadside Picnic”. I am not sure how good the translations are, but the original works are outstanding.
I assume you’re aware Life and Fate is the second volume of a two-book series. The first volume was The Right Cause.
Now here’s the interesting thing. The Right Cause was published in 1952, when Stalin was still alive and in power. That book was pro-Soviet. Stalin died in 1953 as Grossman was writing Life and Fate, which he finished in 1959. And that book had a clear anti-government message and Grossman was unable to get it published in the Soviet Union until 1988. It was published outside the Soviet Union in foreign translations.
The irony is that The Right Cause was never translated into English or published outside of the Soviet Union. So it would have been difficult for anyone to have read both volumes.
I went to that museum a couple of years ago. It was really fascinating and had a lot of quite different styles of art (both the Soviet period stuff and old and modern local stuff). A bit out of the way though, so probably off the radar for a lot of tourists (even if they do make it out as far as Khiva - though would be a good day trip from there). Don’t think there was much else of note for tourists in Nukus either, but makes a good jumping off point to visit the Aral Sea, and a good stopping point if crossing into Turkmenistan from the Konye-Urgench crossing.
More excellent suggestions. Any others?
Little Nemo, yes, I think Grossman’s changing attitude toward the Soviets is one of the things that makes his writing so interesting. I’ve been meaning to read a collection of his journalism (the name escapes me at the moment) – I wonder how much of that trajectory will be visible there.
Red Plenty is about life under Communism in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods.
Isn’t Roadside Picnic actually set in (some future, imaginary) Canada though? I agree that it is an excellent book, that happens to be by Soviet era Russians, but it is not clear to me that it says or is trying to say much about the Soviet Union (or Canada, come to that).
I liked the Dschingis Aitmatov books. I guess before typing long I simply post this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinghiz_Aitmatov
in science fiction I liked the Strugatzkis too 
It is set in some unspecified Western country (probably Anglophone, considering some names). The OP asked for “literature produced in the Eastern bloc under Communism”. And no matter where the setting is, Strugatsky brothers’ writing is about Soviet era Russians 
It is just obfuscated more than usual in the Roadside Picnic.
An out-of-left-field suggestion. There was (is?) a Russian author named Vlas Tenin who wrote a book called Sleep Softly, Dear Comrade back around 1970. It was translated into English and published under the title Moscow Nights in 1973.
Now, fair warning. The story is about a bunch of morally-challenged characters living on the fringe between the Soviet Union’s bureaucracy and criminal underground. One aspect of this story is the decadence of these characters as depicted by some explicit sex scenes. And it was these sex scenes which sold the book.
Kundera was successful before he moved to France, and his work hardly counts as communist literature. None of it meets the OPs requirements, I don’t think. One of his best novels, The Joke, published in (I think) 1967, heavily satirizes the communist system in Czechoslovakia.
As for great communist literature, perhaps have a look at Mayakovskiy’s work, or Maksim Gorkiy. In both cases, they wrote works that they intended to serve as communist propaganda, and both writers were enthusiastic about the achievements of the revolution for large parts of their lives. Still, and this is a common pattern with Soviet writers, esp. pre-war (Pasternak too, for instance), the initial enthusiasm ended in disillusion. Mayakovskiy’s committed suicide; Gorkiy moved to Italy for quite a while until Stalin persuaded him to come back to the SU.
Oh that reminds me, Jaroslav Hašek was a Bolshevik. Although there’s not a lot of ideology in his work.
Does Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovitch” count as “communist literature”?
Its the ultimate in disillusionment (with communism) by a man who desperately wants to believe in it!
What do *you *think? Is Anne Frank’s Diary Nazi propaganda? Is Uncle Tom a white supremacist?