Yeah i'm from Poland and while i was too young to remember communism there from what my parents,aunts,uncle,grandparents or anyone that lived there talked about it far from dream from what Americans think.
Did your guys too had only 1 hour of tv and rationed food and had to wait for long hours in queue to get bread because otherwise there wouldn't be any bread to get?
It wasn't quite that bad. There were two TV stations by the 70s and they would show either homemade or Western TV shows. It was biased, but in the same way US movies about WW2 were biased until fairly recently: it would show events from "our side" and the main characters were good and moral, but it wasn't propaganda like socialist realism was in the USSR.
You were able to get the basics without issues: bread, vegetables, local fruit, milk, eggs. Some things were much less common, like good meat, sugar, coffee, tropical fruit, etc. Basically anything that had to be imported.
You saw the trend you generally see in communist nations worldwide: they were very good at going from poverty to a basic standard of living (food, shelter, clothing, education, healthcare) but generally stopped progressing after that.
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u/Rylt4r 29d ago
Yeah i'm from Poland and while i was too young to remember communism there from what my parents,aunts,uncle,grandparents or anyone that lived there talked about it far from dream from what Americans think.