I don't understand your point, poverty in Eastern Europe has fallen tremendously after the switch to capitalism, but you're saying it has nothing to do with it?
Inequalities might have risen a bit though, I don't know.
All true, and yet a lot of people in USSR and many other East block countries miss those times nowadays, as there were also good things about it, mainly a sense of financial and social security and also "equality" between people (yes, equality in being poor compared to West, but still very little differences in life styles for 99% of people - all kids in your school would wear the same kind of shoes and same kind of cloths, living in the same kind of apartments - there was no rich kids singling out poor ones and all that shit that you have now)
And a lot of those countries had standard of living sharply rise during communist era. People really, really under appreciate how bad conditions were in many of those countries for those who weren't creme de la creme of society, or how much for example interwar Poland history is kept silent about the squalor and poverty of huge portion of the society.
Yes, for various reasons economic systems in many of them failed (or in few cases, it was nationalistic strife that dealt the blow), but others learnt lessons from it (for example, about badly defining and strictly adhering to plans, or too high concentration in one company, etc.)
How about Eastern Europe? There are some extremely poor, yet relatively educated countries, and due to the Soviet legacy, the majority owns the places they live in.
I'm from Eastern Europe, and know many, many people from Eastern Europe, and, while they are poorer than the English of today, it can not even compare to the English from 100 years ago.
Our perception of the older times is based on books, paintings, etc, and those, in most cases, show idealized rosy picture, often of the people from the highest class. Even when they show lower classes, it is much prettied. Our perception of today is, however, based on the harsh reality...
On a side note, being from Eastern Europe as well, I think that, at least mentally, it was different being poor here in the 80s/90s than it was in the western world. Basically you and all of your neighbors and everyone else around you would be poor (unless you were a party member). Everybody had the same starting point when democracy arrived and there was real incentive for factories to come up with a good balance between quality and cost.
50 years of communism in the eastern Europe countries left most of the people with no wealth as it was forbidden to own a company, unless you where co-operating with the secret police and singed a deal with them. This caused the issue that after the collapse of communism and soviet union people with wealth were communist collaborators (there were informing about non-safe people and helping throwing them into jails and sharing money with police officers). Then after communism collapsed they've created TV, media and obviously there was still TV, Radio and press which was government owned, where the same people were working. So as you can see everything is post-soviet countries is still mostly owned by communists and police informants.
Before moving to Europe in 2005, my impression of former-communist countries was that they were all poor/backwards: this was the only context you would have ever hear about them growing up in Israel in the late 80s/90s.
Furthermore the majority of my extended family left the Soviet Union in the 90s but my grandparents came over long before that (fraternal in the 1930s and maternal in the 40s right after WW2). Neither the old nor new arrivals ever talked about their former homelands in a positive way.
To my surprise many former communist countries/cities neighbouring Austria & Germany (I lived in the former for 8 years and in the latter for 5) actually seemed more or less the same as their western counterparts, or least the parts of them that I visited (Prague, Brno, Cracow, to a lesser extent Budapest, Ljubljana & Bratislava).
I therefor assumed the supposed backwardness was mostly just propaganda. But reading the above makes me think that the closer approximation to the truth is that even European (i.e. not central-asian former soviet republics) former-communist countries vary a lot & can't be that simply pigeon-holed.
There are poor people in the US living in comparable (or worse) conditions than people suffered in some of the countries of the "communist block".
I know some older people from the "block" (from Albania and Hungary for example), and some of them look back into that era as "the good times", considering that they were teachers, engineers and other such jobs, and now they clean floors or poor concrete in construction sites to make a living.
Not to mention that not all places were the same quality of living or freedom-wise. Czechoslovakia for example were in far better condition than Albania or Romania.
That's the general feel I get talking to older Westerner europeans. Be it 80s or 90s or 00s or nowadays... Life is good as usual, but relatively it feels worse because you're no longer that rich compared to others. And working class experience seems to be declining due to offshoring etc.
Meanwhile in Eastern europe is as you describe Asia. My parents live tremendously better than their parents. I live better than my parents. And I'm positive my kid will live better than I do. After that... Fingers crossed I'll see the trend going strong. And that's in pretty much any socioeconomic class. While wealth gap is growing since Soviet era, the poor are living better than Soviet era elite. Both in terms of necessities and leisure.
The situation is more complex than that. There was a past before Communism and that past determined the relative wealth of individual countries in the Soviet bloc.
Czech part of Czechoslovakia was one of the industrial centers of Europe since the early 19th century and it was mostly spared from the bombing campaigns of WWII. As such, we had much better living standards than ordinary Russians. When the Soviet-led task force occupied us in 1968 to prevent our split from the Soviet Bloc, the obviously better living standard demoralized the Soviet soldiers who genuinely believed that they were coming to our rescue. The first wave was recalled back to the USSR and their replacements were closed off in remote barracks, not to come into contact with our civilian life.
But rural countries like Bulgaria had very shitty living standards in Communism. My father's family is from Bulgaria, even today the country does not look anywhere near as good as the West and may never catch up.
The classes got wiped out in all Central and Eastern Europe countries which went through communism. Pretty much all of their wealth was confiscated and they were persecuted to a various degree. From society's perspective, it's actually one of the positives of going through the horror of communism - the societies were reset to be much more egalitarian. Even to this day, wealth disparity in post-communist countries is lower than in Western Europe - there wasn't enough time yet for the true billionaire elite class to emerge from the egalitarian soup.
That's funny. I'm talking about the Czech Republic. You are countering with some stories of some miserably poor country in Eastern Europe (yes a few of them still exist). I don't know where it is you're talking about, but God bless them.
Loads of people today who lived under Soviet rule want to return to soviets rule. Capitalism destroyed Eastern Europe. It's horrible over there right now.
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