Boy is that ever true. My parents and their friends were part of the Romanian intelligentsia. My mother was a writer: and that's what she got to be full time. With months of leave to write books/plays/scripts in the newly liberated castles of the aristocracy. I don't actually remember her having to cook one meal throughout my childhood: we ate two meals a day (almost for free) at the restaurant specially dedicated to writers/artists/professors: "University House."
Vacations in the mountains and the black sea; free health care; free education; almost free rent. I'm not making this shit up. Yes, we had to queue for imported fruit. Yes, you had to know somebody who knew somebody for various things, but that wasn't new with "communism." And yes, they had complete contempt for the workers, those upstarts who were making almost as much money as they (but in reality had far fewer privileges).
Ceausescu was a tin pot dictator with delusions of grandeur, and he wrecked the country (with help from the IMF)...they probably did the right thing to leave. What they found in the west was a clerical job for my father (with the Teamsters) and alcoholism/mental illness for my mother who never worked again.
Joanna