An aside: in 1987 I was in East Berlin as a teenager for a couple of days, and just those couple of days, even as a teenager, made me realize what a horrible horrible system it is (e.g. we had police secretly follow us everywhere and people looked miserable). It always makes me wonder how people could travel to these countries, and then come back and still continue to support communism. Did they not have eyes? Likely they were blinded by the idealism of what ‘pure’ communism could provide.
For George Orwell the disillusionment came, if not before, by the time of the Spanish Civil War when he saw the lies and betrayals for himself. I wonder what party-line Communists thought of Orwell.
And the actual violence, he was very nearly executed on soviet orders as the faction he was associated with fell out of favor with the soviet backed communists, many of the people he fought the racists alongside were.
Then (40’s, 50’s, 60’s…) as now, you had people who thought Stalin (+ Che Guevera, et al.) was cool, with a necessary dose of cognitive dissonance. But you also had e.g. super hard-core left-wing people like Emma Goldman publishing texts like My Disillusionment in Russia in the early 1920s lambasting the Bolshevik state and its economic policies. Not everybody was a card-carrying party-line Communist, especially people like George Orwell after they got to deal with those people first-hand. Not that they had good things to say about America, either, but you have to call it like it is.
The ones I knew in the 80s took the position “those countries aren’t doing pure communism, they messed with the recipe to justify autocracy”.
Lots of “no true Scotsman” involved if you ask me.
Given that when asked about oppression communist apologists insisted that simply by definition communism couldn’t be oppressive, I’ve imagined if someone had given the following response:
“Allow me to rephrase the question: what would there be to prevent a tyrannical group of ideologues from calling themselves a revolutionary elite? From aping the rhetoric of Marxism while in practice setting themselves up as an oligarchy? Where they co-opted the revolution and in fact conducted a Robespierrian terror against anyone who advocated genuine socialism? Who insisted that any dissent from their proclamations was ipso facto counter-revolutionary? And where while the capitalists were in fact dispossessed, capitalism was replaced with a system where the workers and farmers effectively became slaves of the state?”
In my experience arguing with such pro-Communist people they’d shift between simply declaring it to be impossible, defending Robespierre and the Terror, and occasionally outright letting the mask slip and start talking about how they need to kill off all the “ghouls” and make sure they have plenty of “skullbreakers” to make sure no one goes agaisnt the party line.
Ultimately any ideology-driven movement is going to either collapse or turn to authoritarianism, for the simple reason that without tyrannical oppression sooner or later people will decide to violate the ideology. Plenty of pro-Communism people try to deny that by claiming that it’ll never happen and once Communism takes over everyone will be 100% compliant to it for all time because nobody would go agaisnt Communism unless they were forced to do so (and no, that’s not an exaggeration of the claim).
For anyone not already a true believer that isn’t remotely plausible, but many of them appear to genuinely believe it.
As I recall my undergraduate years, in the early 1980s with the Cold War at its height, the Communists I was acquainted with at university had a bevy of excuses.
“Everything would have been fine if Lenin hadn’t died so soon.” To these folks, it was Stalin that screwed things up, and set the pattern for people under Communist dictatorships who were not allowed to leave their homelands.
“Well, if people want to leave, it shows that they don’t have faith in a Communist society. Leaving is counter-revolutionary and traitorous.” (Aside: We see that in North Korea and Cuba to this day.) But of course, once everywhere is Communist, that won’t apply. “Once everywhere is Communist, free travel will be allowed.” I always doubted that claim.
“They’re doing it wrong. That’s not what Marx envisioned.” This one was most common. If only these folks were in charge, they’d do it right. It would be nothing like Stalinism. “We’re going to build a paradise on Earth; such a paradise that you won’t need to leave your home country. Just give us a little time. In the interim, we’d prefer if you stay put. Don’t even try to leave, we need you.”
I could go on, but this is what I heard from the so-called Communists when I was doing my undergrad.
I knew a union rep who went to Moscow for his honeymoon in the mid 70’s, so he was very much for the cause. He would counter any criticism of the USSR with isolated examples of bad things the West did. Never accepting the difference in the scale and frequency of such things. USSR locks up dissidents? So what, the UK bans the voice of Sinn Fein on the news. Same thing isn’t it?
Plus he would distort the few good things that communism did. e.g. guaranteed affordable housing for all, but ignoring the fact that it would be 3 generations living in a crowded 2 bedroom apartment.
I went to Moscow myself in the late 80’s just before it all fell apart. You pretty much had to go via the state tourist board, InTourist. They would arrange lots of trips to see the best the country had to offer. A less cynical visitor could easily be convinced that it was almost a utopia.
Nearly 100 years later, this is, sadly, still true.
Tsarist Russia had travel controls. More generally, peasants, serfs, and slaves throughout history have not been allowed to travel freely. Keep in mind that the vast majority of Russians were in those classes. The passport system evolved from the proof one needed that your local lord had given you permission to travel.
I believe the standard excuse was that communism was still in a transitional stage, existing alongside hostile capitalist/fascist opponents. Some unsavory acts were necessary to defend communist countries from these enemies (which included agents who had been planted inside the communist country). But once communism had achieved its inevitable victory and all of the world was communist, there would be no need for these acts and they would happily be abandoned.
On the specific issue of restricting emigration, I believe one excuse was that the communist system had provided for and educated these people when they were young. Now that they were adults, they should be using the knowledge and skills they had been given to help other people. But some greedy misguided individuals wanted to take all that knowledge and skills they had been given by the communist state and run off to a capitalist state where they could use them for their own benefit.
A standard phrase used by Communists and their sympathizers in the West to excuse hostile actions against recalcitrants living under Communist regimes, including mass killings, was “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs”.
People were just eggs to be shattered. Regrettable, but necessary in order to overcome the evils of capitalism. 
Many Americans who were “Communist Sympathizers” were so because they bought into the ideal. If you read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, it is full of a lot of idealistic, flowery stuff that just didn’t exist in reality.
It wasn’t as clear as you think, at least not until the Berlin Wall, which was a stark symbol of imprisonment. It wasn’t nearly as easy to get news/information back then, and even then some sympathizers believed it was western propaganda.
I see a lot of ethnocentrism in this thread.
This is the key word. We know Communism was much more ideological than our capitalistic freedom. We know that. Because our way is clearly better. Ask the Native Americans, they are grateful that we dealt with their forbears properly, in order to build this great country.
I recall hearing a preacher in the '60s say “Free men are not equal and equal men are not free.” It was anti-civil-rights BS, but the basic statement has validity to it. “Freedom” is a dreadfully overplayed theme, which is being used unironically to try to lead the US right down the path of authoritarianism. It is difficult to see the difference between the goals of the American Right Wing and the Soviet Politburo, or that Russia today is an improvement over the RSFSR.
It seems to be a human defect, that we want to delegate our autonomy to a strong leader. It is the theme of history, and no matter how carefully we design our systems, if there is a mechanism of power, someone will try to gain control of it, and the rest of us will let them.
Machiavelli was right: all a nation needs is for the majority of its citizens to be reasonably content (mostly not too terribly oppressed) and the government will persist. Even in the most totalitarian regime, democracy ultimately underlies it, and when conditions become untenable, the government will fall. As long as the more powerful among us are able to maintain a reasonable standard of living for the less powerful among us, it will be fine, until those powerful ones become too ambitious and decide they want to take more than the system will tolerate, and then it all falls apart.
How many of them traveled around freely finding and looking at whatever they wanted or carefully shepherded. I had a girlfriend who went on a trip to China for two weeks in 1980, covering from Shanghai to Beijing. No single thing did they see, no place did they eat that wasn’t selected by their guides.
The latter was sort of understandable as there was very little tourist infrastructure in the country at the time but they weren’t allowed to wander around at will, either in cities or in rural areas.
Even this simple fact, that they weren’t allowed to move around at will, should have been a red flag to anyone visiting, no matter how nice the things they saw were
One would think so but WYSIWYG even without preconceptions. Even Billy Graham, certainly no pinko-commie, was awed by his dinner during his 1992 Moscow trip saying, “Your average American doesn’t eat like this,” to his hosts.
as Horatius observed, during the 30’s US Communists were happy with Stalin until he signed treaty with Hitler
However much one disparages Ayn Rand, I find this quote from “Atlas Shrugged” topical:
they made it sound like anyone who’d oppose the plan was a child killer at heart and less than a human being.