If you are Bulgarian, your country was more privileged during communism. What happened in Romania is that we ended up pretty isolated from the other Warsaw Pac

If you are Bulgarian, your country was more privileged during communism. What happened in Romania is that we ended up pretty isolated from the other Warsaw Pact countries due to Ceausescu’s flirting with the US. We never liked the Soviets for various reasons, most notably for their occupation of Basarabia and for the harsh war reparations that followed WWII, we didn’t like them during Gheorghiu Dej, or during Ceausescu and we suffered for it. Also Ceausescu decided to repay all the foreign debt we had so extreme austerity measures were implemented. So in the 80s we didn’t suffer from a mere shortage of products or services, oh no, the population was actually freezing in the winter and starving. Interestingly it turned out the US’s CIA saw the uprising coming a few years before it happened. We found out about it from some declassified documents (can’t find the link). That our leaders could not see it coming, but the CIA did, shows how broken our leadership was (a phenomenon of communism is that nobody wants to report bad news so everyone in the chain of command ends up lying). Also implied but not explicitly mentioned above is that we had a secret police agency that was among the most brutal in the world. Communism as implemented in Eastern Europe was progressive only on paper. In Romania we had churches and monasteries demolished and priests accused of being legionaries (former fascist / fat-right movement) and taken to political camps. After beaten into submission, the Orthodox Church was then used for controlling the population. And minorities were treated pretty badly. Being a homosexual under Ceausescu was a crime for example and handicapped children were locked away in special homes under inhuman conditions, out of the public’s eye. Truth is freedom of speech is a basic human right that should be absolute. Without it communists have been progressive only on paper, but not in fact. You cannot have a progressive society without freedom of speech. And there’s no communist state that can claim otherwise, not China, not any other communist state that’s still standing. N.B. these days I am left-leaning on social issues, however freedom of speech is where I always draw the line, as all censorship is evil and a slippery slope, even when done for righteous reasons; although I do tolerate censorship on private property, but that’s another discussion.