> I don’t think there was a huge difference in lifestyle between East and West Europe for most people until the late 60’s / early 70’s
For what it's worth, the difference was huge.
At the consumer, daily-grind kind of level the whole country was basically living just above the poverty level. Very few struggled, but the quality of things was shit as was their availability. Those who lived well and had access to the luxuries were still barely on par with the middle Western class. The only way up the ladder was through the party line, which required faking belief in the bright communist future in order to advance. It also restricted what you could and couldn't say, even if the truth was blatantly obvious. Everyone knew that everyone was faking it and that left a profound imprint on generations of people. It wasn't 1984 exactly, but it wasn't that far off either.
I think that's what ultimately did them in - the fundamental dishonesty in the system as everyone told lies about their productivity. And this happened all the way up the reporting line, so any amount that was claimed above the plan got magnified. By the time the numbers arrived at Gosplan, Soviet farmers were the most productive in the world (despite widespread hunger).
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
> levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life
If this study really has that result then it collides pretty hard with the experience of people who actually lived there (like me having grown up in Eastern Germany).
TBF, East Germany did have a pretty good health care system, which in turn may lead to a life expectancy similar to other countries at the time, but at the same time the level of environmental pollution was (literally) breathtaking.
And for 'real-socialist' standards, East Germany was still pretty well off, but at best comparable with poor capitalist European countries like Portugal or Greece.
Also, you simply cannot trust any public data about socialist countries from that time, because those numbers are almost certainly sugarcoated and had little to do with reality (that might at least partly explain how those studies above come to those 'unbelievable' results).
Those studies would have to explain why for 40 some years care packages (clothing, food items, small household goods, etc) sent from emigrees in the West to relatives left behind in Soviet sphere were highly prized in the black market.
I don't think there were any care packages sent the other way around from USSR to US..
Although my father did a brisk trade trading Soviet records for Western records via western penpals - eventually bartering enough Western records for the highly prized Lada car. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAZ-2101
I grew up in USSR and it doesn't collide with my experience in the slightest. Nor does it collide with experience people report in polling after getting to live under both communism and capitalism.
* A remarkable 72% of Hungarians say that most people in their country are actually worse off today economically than they were under communism. Only 8% say most people in Hungary are better off, and 16% say things are about the same. In no other Central or Eastern European country surveyed did so many believe that economic life is worse now than during the communist era. This is the result of almost universal displeasure with the economy. Fully 94% describe the country's economy as bad, the highest level of economic discontent in the hard hit region of Central and Eastern Europe. Just 46% of Hungarians approve of their country's switch from a state-controlled economy to a market economy; 42% disapprove of the move away from communism. The public is even more negative toward Hungary's integration into Europe; 71% say their country has been weakened by the process.
* The most incredible result was registered in a July 2010 IRES (Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy) poll, according to which 41% of the respondents would have voted for Ceausescu, had he run for the position of president. And 63% of the survey participants said their life was better during communism, while only 23% attested that their life was worse then. Some 68% declared that communism was a good idea, just one that had been poorly applied.
* Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an "illegitimate state." In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.
* A poll shows that as many as 81 per cent of Serbians believe they lived best in the former Yugoslavia -"during the time of socialism". The survey focused on the respondents' views on the transition "from socialism to capitalism", and a clear majority said they trusted social institutions the most during the rule of Yugoslav communist president Josip Broz Tito. The standard of living during Tito's rule from the Second World War to the 1980s was also assessed as best, whereas the Milosevic decade of the 1990s, and the subsequent decade since the fall of his regime are seen as "more or less the same". 45 percent said they trusted social institutions most under communism with 23 percent choosing the 2001-2003 period when Zoran Djinđic was prime minister. Only 19 per cent selected present-day institutions.
* 75% of Russians have expressed increasingly positive opinions about the Soviet Union over the years. Only a small portion of those surveyed said they had negative associations with the Soviet Union. The economic deficit, long lines and coupons were named by 4% of respondents each, while the Iron Curtain, economic stagnation and political repressions were named by 1% each, the Levada Center said.
> Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell.
Oh boy oh boy, I don't even know where to start... of course the past is glorified, because people tend to selectively remember only the good things and they are always afraid about the present and an uncertain future
And of course I too have plenty of good memories of my childhood, until my mid teens when the great disillusionment set in about having to live the rest of my life locked up in this petrified country. I don't owe those good childhood memories to East Germany or socialism, but to my family alone.
Of course pre-teen kids don't grasp the reality around them, because they are shielded from it by their families.
And of course there are still die hard communists who led a comfy and safe life in East Germany who then suddenly found themselves without power and purpose in unified Germany (and it's the loss of power which really gnaws on them, not the money, because even the unemployed in West Germany were much better off than a highly qualified factory worker in East Germany).
In the 60's and 70's you would also find enough Germans both in East and West who still said in private that their time in the "Hitler Jugend" or "Bund Deutscher Maedels" was the best of their life. My grandmother was one of them.
If life in East Germany was so great, why do you think people went to the streets in '89 to finally overcome this miserable and bleak existance despite the real risk of being gunned down and rolled over by tanks like in 1953? Not even the police and army loved this state enough to defend it from those so called "counter-revolutionaries".
>people tend to selectively remember only the good things
East Germany suffered less during the recent pandemic because of residual investment in social services and infrastructure. Socialism built a more human-centric society.
>why do you think people went to the streets in '89
Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
Technology changed everything, and people felt like they were missing out on the future. That was the power of television broadcast, like TikTok today, or the Facebook and Twitter of yesteryear.
My family was involved in getting the portable news camcorders designed, the broadcast satellites up, and the reporters into the field of the US's largest national news network by 1980. Suddenly, the entire world could see itself in stunning detail and color.
America made the market and sold the world on the consumption of "newness". We've got it, and you don't! (Topple your government for some fruit!)
I don't think either world was truer than the other, but one was certainly better at making people feel unhappy with what they had.
> East Germany suffered less during the recent pandemic because of residual investment in social services and infrastructure.
You should consider finding different news sources. 4 of the 6 states on the territory of the former GDR are at the top of the 'COVID-related deaths per capita' statistics, in Saxony and Thuringia twice as high as the German average, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern was only saved by its low population density:
> ...investment in social services and infrastructure
This investment mainly happened after the reunification in the 90's, and dwarfs anything the GDR invested in 4 decades of its existence.
> Socialism built a more human-centric society.
Even if that were remotely true it wouldn't have any effect today. The Eastern part of Germany is still poorer than the Western part (even though it caught up quite a bit compared to the difference right after the reunification), which leads to more political extremism (both left and right) and less immunity towards anti-democratic propaganda, like the anti-vaxx bullshit.
Also, back in the 80's East Germans didn't need "US propaganda" to see what's up. Many had relatives in West Germany, and could see the difference of quality of life, and much more important, of personal freedom, with their own eyes.
There are academic papers and there are realities of life under the Soviet rule. Life was substantially shittier than on the West and you didn't need a slide ruler and statistical analysis to see that.
It doesn't mean that it wasn't improving, but the focus of the state was, as others already said, on the industrial development rather than on consumer goods and services, leading to various curious facts such as the lack of mass-produced toilet paper until late 1960s. PQL that.
Stalins reign was one of the largest genocides in human history. Torture, starvation, slave labour, execution, was the fate for millions upon millions of innocent people. The horrors of Stalins regime is beyond any imagination and you can easily look it up if you wish.
Think about what kind of spiritual dammage you are doing upon yourself with the lies you are trying to convince yourself and others of. That damage can be irrevocable.
Meanwhile in the real world, Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960's, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
And if they had instead chosen free market capitalism instead of communism they would have had all that and much more without the enormous human sacrifice. Do you know of anyone who would try to run from the west to the eastern block countries behind the iron curtain? What you are saying is basically the same argument used to argue Nazism was great because it brought the 'autobahn' and the 'Volkswagen' to the common people.
You've been posting tons of ideological, political, and nationalistic flamewar comments, as well as attacking other users egregiously. If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you.
Also, you're way over one important line at which we ban accounts, which is when they're using HN primarily for political or ideological (or nationalistic) battle. Accounts using HN primarily for this are abusive accounts that destroy what HN is supposed to be for.
I don't want to ban you because you've been around a long time and haven't always been abusing the site, but please seriously fix this if you want to continue posting here.
> backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage
This is socialist religious bullshit, Russian Empire had a dense network of rail tracks, not to mention Transsib. Large Russian cities had aerodromes by 1917.
I can see how you have flagged three people who opposed to it with reasonable comments, but you did not flag the original page-long Communist copypasta.
Which makes me think that, amusingly, the HN moderator dang is an open communist.
It's pride time of the year, after all, so whom am I to judge.
I replied to that commenter here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36207435. We're equal-opportunity moderators, but I agree with you that dang being a secret communist (let alone an open one) is pretty amusing.
Attacking another user will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. You've unfortunately been doing this more than once (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143537). Please don't do it again.
I think it is my duty to speak out against the terror and genocide of the Soviet Union, lest it becomes forgotten. Millions were executed or sent to concentration camps for speaking out, so I guess getting silenced on HN is a cheap price to pay. My own people were genocided in Stalins Soviet Union, how could I be silent?
At another level, I completely appreciate how the atrocities and tragedies of the past are still affecting people today and thus I understand and appreciate how you feel.
At the same time, that doesn't make generic ideological battle (which "speaking out against the terror and genocide of the Soviet Union, lest it becomes forgotten" is definitely an example of) on topic for HN. We want curious conversation here. The state you're describing, of battling for people who were genocided in the past, is entirely justified but it is not a state of curiosity. It's therefore off topic for this site.
To say that something is off topic for this site is not a criticism or judgment. Many legitimate, valuable things are off topic for this site. That's because we're trying to have a very specific kind of forum here. It's not a place where "anything goes" - it's a place for a specific kind of interaction.
For what it's worth, the difference was huge.
At the consumer, daily-grind kind of level the whole country was basically living just above the poverty level. Very few struggled, but the quality of things was shit as was their availability. Those who lived well and had access to the luxuries were still barely on par with the middle Western class. The only way up the ladder was through the party line, which required faking belief in the bright communist future in order to advance. It also restricted what you could and couldn't say, even if the truth was blatantly obvious. Everyone knew that everyone was faking it and that left a profound imprint on generations of people. It wasn't 1984 exactly, but it wasn't that far off either.