> That's not the type of misery I thinks of when the USSR comes up — the gulags, the secret police, the inability to leave, the propaganda, not the housing. Th

> That's not the type of misery I thinks of when the USSR comes up — the gulags, the secret police, the inability to leave, the propaganda, not the housing. Those were absolutely non-issues for anyone but a small minority of people. Movement limitation, which varied in time, is the only thing that applied to a much larger subset of people. It required quite some bureaucracy to travel. Gonna give you an example: people that were members of the communist party enjoyed an easier time from this point of view. Everyone could join the party by the way, but it was generally unpopular. In Poland I think, e.g., despite the advantages of being a party member, at its peak only few millions were part of it.