40 years is not a "really long time" when talking about how long a system of government should survive. It's well under a lifetime, and is around the number of

40 years is not a "really long time" when talking about how long a system of government should survive. It's well under a lifetime, and is around the number of years people in the US expect to work before retirement. Taking just the GDR for example, statistically anyone who was born around the years of its founding went on to outlive that government by another 20-25 years. You can't really call a government stable if basically everyone born into it is expected to outlive it. https://database.earth/population/germany/life-expectancy#:~:text=Historic%20Life%20Expectancy%20in%20Germany,years%20of%20life%2C%20on%20average https://database.earth/population/germany/life-expectancy#:~.... And independently of the question of whether or not 40 years is a "long time", the fact also remains that Warsaw Pact Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia had large scale uprisings in the 1950s and 1960s which were violently put down by the Soviet military. Ergo, the East Bloc was not a stable system.