In Prague there is a Museum of Communism, which includes a lot of information about life in the city before the fall of Communism. It includes little mock grocery stores and classrooms with a lot of video footage. It’s pretty interesting. You’ll have to check it out if you go back.
My favorite part was the secret police section. On the informational poster, in big red letters, it read: “The secret police in Prague could even tap your phone without a warrant!” That one made me smile.
PJ O’Rourke has a description of his trips into East Berlin, once before the fall of the Wall, and once after. In the former story, he described it as “Once you pass through Checkpoint Charlie, it’s as though the picture changed to black and white”.
He described being required to purchase $25 of East German currency, and, finding nothing whatever to spend money on, wadding it up and throwing it into a trash can before returning to West Berlin. (As noted above, he would have been unable to take it back through the border.)
Well, I was not a tourist in a communist country, I was simply living there, so it is not exactly what you’ve asked for. A foreign tourist would have seen everything in a different light than me, I would guess, since I was just a kid and life was beautiful for me. I was only 10 in '89, when things changed in a big way.
I was living in a small city about 100 km from Bucharest (capitol city of Romania). First, you have to know that there where big differences between the countries in the east-european bloc. Actually, it is not by chance that Poland, Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia where the first to be accepted in UE. Romania and Bulgaria had to wait another 3 years, and the differences between them and the first group are still significant. Yugoslavia was also (economically speaking) more or less on the same level as Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but the splitting and the series of wars that followed pushed them back a lot. I remember, in mid 90’s, seeing footage of their civil war…well, even in the middle of the war, their houses where much better looking than a typical house from a typical village in Romania.
I remember that Polish tourist, on their way to Black Sea, where selling things like towels, underwear, knifes, forks…theirs where so much better than the ones we could buy in our shops. Actually, this kind of trade was quite the norm in the eastern bloc, since there where strict rules concerning the amount of money you could carry in a foreign country (even a friendly socialist one). So, you would better pack your car with various items that you could sell at your destination.
Speaking of cars, going on vacation was not as simple as “pack your luggage and put it in the trunk, we’ll leave in the morning”. You see, a car needs fuel to run…and the official quota in the '80s was 8 litres per week. Which was enough for about 100 km. So, one had to find “alternative” ways to fill the tank before leaving. And then hope that it will be somehow possible to refill it on the way. It was a good idea to plan the trip through places where you had friends or relatives, 'cause they might have been able to help you find some petrol… I still remember my uncle’s “nice” words when he had no choice but to fill with low-quality gasoline (78 octane, IIRC), and the sound the engine was making after such a “treatment”.
Probably a tourist wouldn’t have noticed all this…only that there were very few cars on the streets. But he would have noticed for sure when the electricity was missing. At random intervals and without any kind of warning, whole quarters where left in darkness. Making economies, you see… What for? Never really knew. Not that I would have missed the TV shows; there was only one TV channel which was airing for about 2 hours daily. 80% of which was propaganda. On Saturdays and Sundays there were 3 additional hours…a real feast for a kid. Except that, in order to see Disney’s version of “Jungle Book” I needed about 3 months, 'cause the whole movie was cut in 6-minutes long episodes. One each week.
If our tourist would have been up early in the morning (say, 5 a.m.), he would have seen long lines of people waiting endless hours for a bottle of milk, 1 kg of sugar, 1liter of cooking oil or some meat. The lines where often formed just because someone heard a rumour about some item that maybe, will be available that day in a specific store. Bread, butter, meat, where rationalised. In my city there were some self-service supermarkets, but usually there was not much to choose from. Oh, and one thing to keep in mind: always have a bag with you! Because bags where never available in stores, and there was always a chance to stumble upon an already formed line, and without a bag you couldn’t buy much.
I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for (actually, you’ve asked about Budapest and Prague and I cannot help you with that)…feel free to ask if you’d like to know something else.
There were 3 lines; one to select merchandise, one to pay for it, and one to actually get it. Efficiency was not a concern, employing as many people as possible was.
I wish my great aunt was still alive. She never married and was very well traveled (5 out of 7 continents). She traveled to the Eastern Block several times. She talked about Soviet notions of “a workers paradise” in mocking tones and compared some of the Party members she met to aristocrats. She was also amused at how the “atheistic” Soviets rigidly observed the Sabbath. One time her tour group was in a part of the country without an Intourist hotel (at least one suitable for Westerns) and they were put up in a hotel for ranking Party members. It was nicer that anything else she stayed in the Bloc, nice by American standards.
I have a sister who travelled to USSR in the 1970’s, (she’s hit 6 of the 7 continents) and said how good a tiny fraction of the population had it, and how stark and dehumanizing it was for the vast majority.
There are a couple of posters on this board who would have been well served to have experienced 1st hand how wonderful the Socialist system is in practice, rather than in theory…
I lived in what was then West Germany for the academic year 1977-78, and went to Berlin for a one-week seminar. As ugly a symbol as the US/Mexico border fence may be to some, it pales in comparison to what the inter-German border was like in those days. Barbed wire, guard towers and orders to shoot on sight, and mine fields, it was all true. For most people, the Berlin Wall is the primary physical symbol of the Cold War, but the border fence, given its sheer length, was rather more disturbing IME. In Berlin, the DDR couldn’t force West Berlin to demolish blocks and blocks of property to isolate the Wall on both sides. By contrast, the inter-German fence line went mostly through rural districts with only a small town here and there, so it seemed more starkly ominous in its isolation. Besides, IIRC it was quite a bit higher all along its length than the Wall was.
One afternoon we were shown around East Berlin. A guide boarded the bus and proceeded to give us detailed descriptions of the sights with a strongly pro-regime bent. And the flags! If you think we Americans are a little too flag-wavey–and I agree we are sometimes–we’ve got nothing on the pre-1989 government of East Germany! There were red flags everywhere you looked, far more, actually, than DDR flags. I don’t remember much of her presentation, except the part where she said that East Germany also had the conservative “Union” parties–Christian Social Union and Christian Democratic Union–just as the West did. This was true, but, as our guide informed us, they worked toward the same goals as the Socialist Unity Party! I bet they did, too.
A final odd bit: We stopped to stretch our legs at Treptow Park, and I asked the guide if there was a restroom in the area. She answered, “In a park??” Did the East Germans think that physiological functions stopped altogether in the confines of a park? 
Mod hat on, but no warning
Your post was fine, until you added the last sentence. If you want to criticize the opinions of other poster on this board, do so in the pit. If you want to criticize the “Socialist” system as it exist(ed)s in other countries over time, feel free to start a thread. But adding politically tinged comment to threads in General Questions is probably not a good idea.
No harm, no foul.
samclem Moderator, General Questions
Sorry Samclem— I didnt mention anyone specifically, so didnt think it was offensive to anyone specifically…
I have never knowingly engaged anybody on this board in a negative manner, (or ever posted anything in the Pit) and did not join the Straight Dope to argue or insult. I hope anyone I may have offended with this post will accept my apology.
Matthew
A couple of years back Bob Dylan was playing a month long tour of Europe, and I headed over for a couple weeks to catch a few of his shows; in Berlin he played the Treptow Arena, located in what was East Berlin—In all my life I have never been to a music or sporting venue that was so dumpy, beat up and poorly designed. It was like a massive Quanset hut from the 1950’s. It felt I was stepping back in time upon entering. As recently as 2006, the former East Berlin is much less developed than West Berlin is…
(It was also the best performance he delivered of the 7 different cities shows’ that I attended—Go figure!!!)
One thing that should be noted is that despite all being members of the happy Comintern family (except for Albania and Yugoslavia), the nations of Eastern Europe were hardly one unified economy. Mother Russia drove her nearest nations, especially the Baltics, into abject poverty, while the Western-more nations generally favored better, particularly Czechoslovakia which enjoyed some amount of trade with the West. The isolated Albania suffered economic hardship for decades, especially after the 1973 break with China, while the Tito’s “Socialism with a human face,” allowed Yugoslavia to be relatively wealthy with a standard of living comparable to some of the (admittedly less prosperous) nations of Western Europe.
One thing that friends I know from the former East Bloc report is that violent crime was almost non-existent in the days of the Soviet Union; most crime was petty theft, drug smuggling and abuse, voluntary prostitution, and the like. While luxury goods may not have been plentiful, well-made, or appealing, basic necessities were nearly always available in the post-Stalin era, even as the economies of the East Bloc nation struggled. These days many of the nations of Eastern Europe are unsafe and besieged by predatory criminals, involuntary prostitution and human trafficing, kidnapping, et cetera, and many basic staples are available only at excessive cost.
Although hardly a definitive metric of the difference in lifestyle and economic prosperity of the West and the East during the Communist era, it is amusing to compare the venerable and ubiquitous (to those of use who went to high school and college in the 'Eighties) Apple II microcomputer to a Russian clone, the Agat.
Stranger
Stranger, it’s a little bit difficult to make out what your point is. First, “Socialism with a human face” isn’t associated with Tito of Yugoslavia, it is solely associated with Dubcek of Czechoslovakia. You should know better before posting.
You seem to buy into the old Soviet line that there wasn’t violent crime in the USSR because no one needed to commit violent crime. I’d suggest that the KGB committed violent crime every day.
We’ll let “unsafe and besieged by predatory criminals, involuntary prostitution and human trafficing, kidnapping, et cetera,” be, because it sounds so much like Eastern European propaganda.
One question. Would you rather live in Moscow of 1979, or Moscow of 2009?
I was a kid when communism in Eastern Europe ended, but I sent two years (2006-2008) living in rural Bulgaria and I’ve heard a lot of stories about what it was like. FWIW, I really don’t know how to take all of this, because I think a LOT of it is viewing the past through rose-colored lenses, but to hear my coworkers talk about it, things were better for them during communism than they are today. My colleagues (I was a teacher) would moan about how the lack of discipline in school was due to democracy and during communism the kids had respect for teachers. A good friend of mine once told me that the difference between communism and democracy was that “during communism, there was hardly anything in the store, but I could afford any of it. Now, the stores are full of goods, but I can’t afford it.” She told me that during communism, she could go to the sea every year for two weeks, but now she never got to go.
The thing to keep in mind here is that I lived in a rural area, in a village of 3,000 people. These rural areas were buoyed by communism, while I feel like most of the other anecdotes in this thread are related to urban areas, which were dragged down. Urban Bulgarians I’ve met much prefer democracy and the free market. A lot of communist-era stuff still goes on in rural areas. I once blogged about how on 9 May - which was formerly the holiday that celebrated the end of WW2 and is a Russian holiday and is now the Day of Europe and an EU holiday - my colleagues sang patriotic Russian songs they had been taught as kids and we watched the ceremony and parades from Red Square on TV, and some dude from Plovdiv, the second-largest city in Bulgaria, drove by my blog and accused me making things up because he’d never seen anything like that. In the TINY village where I first lived in Bulgaria, on 24 May, which is the Day of Bulgarian Culture, we paraded through the streets with a marching band. My Bulgarian language teacher - who was from a very nearby, but much larger city - thought it was hilarious and said that this was what they did during communism and she hadn’t seen anything like it since she’d been a kid.
As previously noted, different countries had really different things going on. Yugoslavia was, I think, considered much more advanced and free by other Communist countries. My Bulgarian language teacher, who grew up very close to what’s now the Macedonian border, told me that she can understand Serbian very well because they used to get Yugoslav TV channels and they had way better programming than Bulgarian TV. I think a lot of this stuff carries over to today - I’ve heard a couple people from the former Yugoslavia make derogatory comments about Bulgaria for being backwards and wild and out of control and I’m kind of thinking “oh really? Whose country was it that disintegrated into a vile three-way civil war in the 1990s? OH RIGHT THAT WAS YOU GUYS.”
I’ve also heard that Romania was considered to be the worst place to live under communist rule, but I really can’t imagine anything could have been worse than Albania, which was totally shut off from the outside world after Hoxha broke off ties with Mao, and where only high party elites were allowed to own cars, and where they covered the landscape with ~700,000 cement bunkers from which they would fight off the inevitable Yugoslav invasion. And yet…I’ve still met Albanians who say life was better under communism. I don’t get it.
Fuck, missed the edit window:
Here’s a picture I took while waiting at the Macedonian/Albanian border, in case you’re not familiar with the crazy Albanian bunkers. These things are EVERYWHERE.
Actually, Notassmartasithought, without making a political point about the relative merits and demerits of soviet communism, it is fairly generally acknowledged that what Stranger writes is true. All of the ‘crime’ was perpetrated by the state, as you point out, but things like muggings, graffiti, drug abuse and a host of the other things that **Stranger **mentions were uncommon at the very least. After the opening up of the Eastern bloc, along with a whole bunch of Western luxury goods came crime, both organized and unorganized. This has affected the life of many in the post-communist world and explains why a lot of the people in that area consider the collapse of communism as a mixed blessing at the very best. Nostalgia for the communist period and the security that it offered is a strong factor in most of the post-communist countries, both in popular culture (consider films such as Goodbye Lenin) and politically. No matter how superior democracy and freedom of speech are, many people in Eastern Europe feel that they are and can genuinely said to be losers of the transition in very real ways.
The main difference, I would say, is that there was no organized crime. No Mafia-style organizations, no neighbourhood gangs, no street corner prostitutes. However, I strongly suspect that robberies, rape, theft where at least as common as in West. Thing is, nobody was speaking about that and there where no official statistics. In the good communist party tradition, a problem that nobody talked about didn’t really existed. But I clearly remember discussions (at home, between relatives and family friends) about women attacked in poorly lit areas (and the public illumination was a joke, it was quite hard to find a properly illuminated area). IMO, this safety feeling est-europeans have when speaking about communist era is not entirely justified. Maybe they were safer, but I suspect they were also misinformed about the real risks.
Then, of course, you have tens of thousand people killed by the state. Work "colonies", political prisons, people shot while trying to cross the border, people beaten to death by the militia because they dared to say something about the "dear leader". Of course, one was "safe" from all this as long as one was standing in line and obeyed the rules. But, sooner or later, you were bound to break them. Take sex, for instance. An estimated 10.000 to 15.000 women died in Romania in between 1966 and 1989 due to illegal abortions. The abortions where often performed by people with no medical training, in horrible conditions (on the kitchen table). Why weren't they performed in a hospital? Well, because abortion was illegal. Then, one might ask, why not use birth control? Well, there was none. No condoms, no pills, no information about fertile period, nothing (except for black market, and that was illegal too). You see, there was a kind of five year plan for increasing the population, which was instituted by a 1966 decree. So, having sex was a very unsafe activity if you weren't planning having children. (IIRC abortions where allowed only after having 4 kids). Even after a successful abortion a woman was still in danger of being arrested, because gynaecologists where sent to factories to perform mandatory consultations on all women.
Overall, there was a lot of violence (and violent deaths) back then. It was not the same kind as in Western countries, but the death toll was quite high.
This is true, in the sense that no one was starving to death. For some reason, Romania had a quite big oceanic fishing fleet. The consequence of this was that the stores where having plenty of canned fish. Actually, oceanic fish was easier to find than bread. I guess a person can survive indefinitely on a fish diet.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. This was (and still is) a real problem. As Kyla said, there were a lot of opportunities to work in a western country and a lot of people went to work abroad (the number of romanians currently working in Italy and Spain is higher than 1 million, by some estimations. Romania has currently a population of about 22 millions). Many of these opportunities where legit, but a lot of them weren’t.
Yeah, “everything was cheaper back then” is a common theme in Romania too. If you define “cheap” as “the amount of money I have to spend for this item", then it’s true. But when you have to wait in a line for several hours (eventually being replaced by your wife/kid at some point, 'cause you have to make run for the toilet) for 6 oranges, I think those wasted hours have to be counted too. Or when you needed to pull some strings for buying a color TV set. Visits to the doctor where free…but one had to give something to the doctor and to the nurses. A bar of soap or a pack of cigarettes where the standard “gift”. Marlboro and Kent where hard currency back then (available only on the black market, of course). Cheap, they say? No, it wasn’t.
And some things where clearly very expensive. A new car was priced at 70.000 lei (there was only one type of car, so it was easy to choose. And you had to wait at least half a year to have it.) A typical salary was about 2500, so you needed more than 2 years worth of payments. I’m not familiar with prices in Western Europe back then, but I guess one could had a new car for less than this.
Problem is, people were mastering this combination of centralized economy and black market. They where accustomed with it and everything seemed “easy” and safe. Then capitalism came, rules changed and suddenly their “know-how” was useless. So it is true that they where safer in the old days, because they knew the system and its rules. But the system and the rules sucked big time.
I have some older relatives and family friends that have adapted quite well to the new rules. It took some time (more than a decade, I’d say), but they’re on their way to middle class status now.
Rural areas had the worst of it during the transition. About 40% of the population where peasants, working in the local kolkhoz. When the kolkhozes suddenly disappeared and the land returned to the owners, they’ve found themselves unemployed. The pensions where very small and they were able to survive mostly because they had a small surface of land and they where able to grow their own food and raise one or two pigs and a cow. Actually, having relatives in the country side was a big advantage during the communist era; often, it was the only way of getting fresh vegetables and fruits. It’s not surprising that rural areas are the most nostalgic.
Making and selling antennas for being able to receive foreign TV stations was a very productive branch of the black market. As I was living in the southern part of the country, we were getting the 2 bulgarian TV channels. In the west of the country they were having serbian and hungarian ones. It was a good way for us to learn a foreign language. I suspect that the reverse is not true: we had the crappiest TV channel, probably no one outside Romania was interested in it.
Me too, I think Albania had the worst situation. At least in Europe, because nothing can beat North Korea.
Dan_ch do you still live in Romania? I was in Bucharest last year (during the NATO summit - note to everyone: never go on holiday during a NATO summit) and had a really nice time. It was interesting to see the differences and the similarities between Romania and Bulgaria. I wish I’d had more time to see other parts of the country, but I obviously suck at planning (or I wouldn’t have been there during a fucking NATO summit in the first place).
Yeah, I totally believe you. Like I said, I never knew how seriously to take all the kvetching my colleagues did. I do believe that the transition from communism to democracy has been very difficult, but I don’t necessary think it has to do with communism or democracy per se, it’s more the general disintegration of society. The last three generations of Bulgarians have seen three totally different systems of government - my ancient landlady once bemoaned the loss of the monarchy to me - and it’s just really destabilizing to have that much change. I think people just say “everything is so screwed up right now, our government is corrupt and incompetent” (which is true) and remember fondly to the past when there was at least some semblance of stability.
It is obvious that there was a whole lot of state violence and that people were not safe from the secret police - but as far as violence visited on citizens by other citizens, the situation does seem to have worsened after 1989. Still, it’s going to be hard to actually confirm this since 1) there’s no reliable pre-1989 data and 2) what we know about this is distorted by the propaganda that was made out of it. All the same, I’m quite prepared to believe that if we do not take state-violence into account, things got worse crime-wise in large parts of the post-communist world. I guess it’s quite likely that if you’re running a 24/7 police state that a relative absence of crime is going to be one of the benign side effects.
Re: the abortion issue - FWIW, this (really dreadful) aspect of communist life was specific to the Romania, where the government was apparently out to create a lot of new communists really quickly. They made this film 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days about it recently (imdb) - Dan_ch, did you see that and what did you think of it? Anyway, in the other parts of the communist bloc, abortion was totally liberalized and generally seen as a fairly casual procedure. There’s some staggering statistics on abortion in Russia, where something in the vicinity of 10-20 per cent (WAG) of the female population has undergone this procedure, in many cases on several occasions.
Great reading guys. Very informative. Thank you.