Yeah. I said EE, but I really meant the USSR (specifically the RSFSR), which is the only place I am familiar with, and specifically the late Brezhnev era to the Gorbachev era.
In my experience, people's complaints about that era generally revolve around "I couldn't get cool stuff," not around "I had no personal and political freedom! My intelligence was being insulted!"
I think that what is going on is a foreign projection of what Eastern Europe is "supposed to be like," specifically a left-wing variant that says "'stalinism' was bad, but for reasons leftists think are important, and therefore Eastern Europeans must think that 'stalinlsm' was bad for the reasons leftists think are important." The same thing that saw a "workers' uprising" anytime there was discontent in an Eastern Bloc country.
--- On Wed, 6/17/09, Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> [WS:] I think this is basically true, but it does not tell
> the whole story. The relationship between the
> intelligentsia and "the system" was far more ambiguous and
> changing over time and geography. For example, the
> Czech intelligentsia was generally very supportive of the
> Communist system in its initial phase - mainly because they
> thought it offered them unprecedented opportunity and
> power. In Poland, Jewish intelligentsia was also
> supportive for similar reasons. However, Polish
> intelligentsia, with its "social origins" in downwardly
> mobile small landowning class (the szlachta) tended to be
> more reactionary. Although decimated in WW2, its
> reactionary ethos lingered after WW2 like a fart in the
> pants (as they say in the old country.)
>