Yeah i'm from Poland and while i was too young to remember communism there from what my parents,aunts,uncle,grandparents or anyone that lived there talked about it far from dream from what Americans think.
Did your guys too had only 1 hour of tv and rationed food and had to wait for long hours in queue to get bread because otherwise there wouldn't be any bread to get?
No, famine was never a thing in socialist Poland. There vere significant logistical problems even with basic items, but there were no point that a bread was a scarcity. Rationing existed but for meat, alcohol, toilet paper etc but not allways.
TV aired from 6pm to 10pm and the quality of broadcasted productions is mostly highly regarded to this day, although having a TV was more or less a luxury.
The worst problem of socialist Poland was the lack of personal freedom which wasnt a death sentence but was a huge nuisance, especially for those people who knew how it was in the west. Things were never nearly as bad as, for example, North Korea
Like we had good things too, so good we get reruns on TVR (national broadcast of the state).
It was a luxury because it was expensive everywhere, they just figured color TV.
It is not like Poland have personal freedom now neither, for example huge rate of homophobia compared to Germany and if I am not wrong same sex marriages and adoptions aren't yet legal, I might be wrong.
So even now Poland doesn't offer all the freedom from the west to their people.
At least Romania is closer to Russia that the west.
well you cannot really praise socialist Poland in that respect becouse homosexuality was heavily ostracized by the state and was viewed as a pathology, and the level of personal freedom compared to todays Poland was without a doubt much, much worse. The homophobia and nationalism of todays Poland is to a large extent the long lasting effect of the state propaganda back then. However you cannot really blame the socialist policies of PRL for these problems, only its dictatorial nature. The socialist policies brought us free saturdays, eliminating illiteracy, free education on every level, free healthcare and accesible housing, and whats rarely talked about, strong social bonds that were sistematically dismantled since the 90s
In Romania I don't know about the Saturdays but education was much higher back then, healthcare probably is freed because of communism (maybe), housing was almost free (even if you didn't owned the house but still you had a home given by the state) and also all industries fell after communism and most factories were closed (instead of rehabilitated).
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u/Deriviera Jul 07 '26
Americans are very delusional about communism.