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Comment by WastingMyTime89 | Hacker News Reader

This is something I heard a lot from people from the former GDR. Usually, they start by acknowledging the bad things: the limited opportunity to travel, the surveillance. But then, they tell you about what they miss. Knowing their neighbours, a certain idea of fraternity and togetherness in hardship, the feeling that even as a poor kid you could achieve something and be useful to society as a whole, the absence of really dire poverty.

I think people especially in the US are quick to dismiss the Soviet Republics while ignoring what they did get right and the alienating parts of their own culture.

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So, like western european countries near GDR (which is in Europe so no point in comparing it with US), but with surveillance and inability to travel?

I don’t know which Western European countries you are talking about but I’m French and the country is absolutely nothing like that.

In what sense is it "nothing like that"? France is quite socialist politically, as a poor kid you can aspire to obtain free and good quality education, get some help from the state if you are in poverty while relying on free health care.

What do you think bloc countries and Soviet union were? Some kind of communist utopias? They appear to "didn't have dire poverty" because "social parasitism"[0] was a criminal offense for a long time. Like, police (sorry, "militia"!) could stop you on the street during work hours and arrest you if you didn't have a document from your boss or from a doctor allowing you to skip work. In later times "undesirables" were just forcibly relocated from "nicer" places [1]. Unfortunately description of these in English are quite lacking, but as a person born in USSR I can assure you that all the nostalgia for that times is either coming from old people who actually just nostalgic for their youth (old joke on the subject: - Gradpa, why are you keep saying it was much better under Stalin? - Because I could still get an erection back then!), or intentional political propaganda.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_parasitism_(offense)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre

Plus survivor bias.

The people who live in St. Petersburg and Moscow today are there because none of their families/ancestors were purged.

The ones who did are in Siberia, or dead.

> Knowing their neighbours

Not knowing they worked for the stasi…

Yeah it wasn't all bad if you weren't in the 50% if the population that Stalin murdered.

I mean, no offense, but considering I actually talked with these people, it’s pretty obvious that they were born a decade after the death of Stalin. You do realise there was 36 years between Stalin death and the fall of the Berlin Wall, don’t you?

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