> 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."
I don't think this is done so much out of a romantic desire to envision the opposition to Communism as idealistic and libertarian, but rather as a cognitive defense mechanism against having to think through the failure and rejection of a non-market economy. Critiques of planned economies coming from Western intellectuals can always be dismissed as bourgeois mystification. Widespread unhappiness and systematic rejection from the working class under socialism is a problem.
SA