> This is bullshit and you know this.

Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The Eastern Bloc had plenty of terrorism, as well as organized crime -- who do you think was supplying all those black markets?

Being a police state is one thing; being an _effective_ police state is something else, much harder (at least in the pre-computer era). In the Soviet case, it didn't help that they didn't really care much about crime...

Plenty of terrorism? USSR funded and commited plenty of terrorism, but I've yet to hear of any terrorist incidents prior to the perestroila..

Soviets did have some organized crime, but they were well, Russians.

GDR, Czechoslovakia, etc, somewhat less inept countries had very little crime and no organized crime to speak of.

> Plenty of terrorism? USSR funded and commited plenty of terrorism, but I've yet to hear of any terrorist incidents prior to the perestroila..

While the regime exercised strong control of information prior to glasnost, and had plenty of motive to repress information that would indicate weakness of the regime, there are numerous known hijackings, the 1977 Moscow bombings, and others. (While reliable information about responsibility for some, and any broader organizational responsibility that might be behind those clearly responsible for others, is hard to come by, there does seem to be a disproportionate link to Armenia among the known incidents, with some specifically linked to Armenian nationalists.)

What was the cost of that "safety" ? There is no such thing as a free lunch it seems

Former Soviet national here...

In the Soviet case, it didn't help that they didn't really care much about crime...

What gives you that idea?

Solzhenitsyn on Stalin, to be honest. _The First Circle_ is fiction, but I find it hard to imagine that he would have described Stalin as not caring about burglars unless that could be imagined of him...

Solzhenitsyn in general gives a sense that the USSR wanted to keep things more or less held together, but wasn't that concerned about people who fell between the cracks.

If you equate Stalin with "the USSR", you're wilfully excluding about 40 years of additional history--history that was very, very different after 1953, and certainly is not captured in gulag literature.

What do you know about crime in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years? (A whopping 29 years combined.)

> The former eastern Bloc had no terrorist incidents.

Yeah, the whole Eastern Block was one big terrorist incident All the terrorists in the world combined have nothing on Stalin's death count.

No terrorism that you'd hear of anyway. But the former USSR was anything but the solid unified entity you might think it was. There was tons of strife and occasional acts of terrorism as well as attempts by states to break away from the mothership, all of which were characterized as acts of terror by the leaders. One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter, and the former USSR had plenty of the latter.

Usually in such a society the state is the terrorist.

> The former eastern Bloc had no terrorist incidents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorism_in_the_Sovi...