I think it's better to be more careful when talking and thinking about Eastern Bloc under Soviet occupation. The socialist regimes are worse than capitalist on

I think it's better to be more careful when talking and thinking about Eastern Bloc under Soviet occupation. The socialist regimes are worse than capitalist ones on average, but the socialist, centrally planned system may be (and was) more efficient in specific areas it decided to take care of explicitly. Your example of the lack of ice cream is one side of the coin; the other is activation of the female workforce, virtually ending illiteracy and providing truly universal health care and education, for free of course. An average person was much better off under the Soviet-controlled regimes than they had been before the war. There is reason why for example Germans don't hate the time they lived in DDR that much. > A higher % of the population is finishing high school, and considerably more are going to University than ever before. In the 1960's maybe 12% went on to college, now it's past 30% - and the numbers of those doing 'something' post high-school is near 60%. And that tiny percentage is good? It's way behind what socialist states achieved in the seventies even now, then. Of course, on the whole, the socialist (there was no real communism in Eastern Europe at all, by the way) regimes were inefficient and people had many of their rights denied. You could land in jail for telling a simple joke, that's true. On the other hand, millions of people didn't feel the need to tell "that kind of jokes" and they lived quite comfortable lives, even if they lacked a certain kind of ice cream. Even in Poland, where opposition to the socialist regime is part of national identity, many people became disillusioned with the free market and capitalism after the shock of the early nineties. For more than twenty years after that, it was "in bad taste" to say anything in defense of the previous system or against the current one. However, in recent years, some people started voicing their discontent with the current system while recalling good sides of the previous one. If this happens even here, in Poland, then it's safe to assume (I think) that the upsides of that system existed.