It's funny how even more than 20 years after the fact there can still be such misunderstandings about the realities on the ground.

You'd say that the days of having to misrepresent the situation 'on the other side' of the iron curtain were long over but it's far from that.

Let me try to give an outsiders perspective:

- crime:

  - nearly non-existent, except when perpetrated by officials

- education:

  - not quite as good as the top schools in the west for
    many subjects but *very* good in some, such as math,
    engineering and such

- unemployment:

  - non-existent. For everybody, no matter how low on the
    totem pole there was a job, even if it meant bad pay
    and long hours. But bad pay and long hours are to be
    found in plenty of places, the USA and Canada are no
    exception to this

- health care

  - free. And of a reasonable standard. Ok, you wouldn't 
    be able to get some fancy surgery so your life
    expectancy wasn't quite up to it from that point 
    of view, but on the whole I would say it was simpler,
    more humane and in many ways better than some of the
    more extreme cases in the west (Terri Schiavo anybody?)

- happiness:

  - difficult to gauge. People that I knew when living in
    the east block compared to the west before the fall 
    of the wall and the 'iron curtain' were on the whole 
    as happy or happier than those that I knew in the west.

    Friendships were real and lasted a lifetime in many
    cases, family ties were fairly closely knit and
    children were on the whole loved and safe, much safer
    than those 'free' children in the west. Again, 
    officials would occasionally mess things up for the
    people but in this respect people did form a block. 

- information

  - Even though the punishments were severe there was a
    lively underground in the form of samizdat (sp?) and
    'culture houses' were movies from the west were shown
    to friends. And not just the Hollywood movies, also 
    those from other countries. So the people there had a 
    limited view of what was going on in the rest of the 
    world through the official channels, which mostly
    read like 'good news' and 'motivational' stories.
    (I recall one front page article about a girl 
    that had broken the record in nursing her kid or
    something to that effect), it was seriously delayed 
    but between the drip feed of information from 
    travelers, radio free europe, the bbc world service 
    and a whole pile of other channels people were
    remarkably well informed.

- standard of living

  - about the same as in the west 25 years earlier. So 
    colour tv's were fairly common but so were b&w sets
    relatively few people with a quality car, plenty 
    of two-strokes (trabant, wartburg, syrena, polonez
    zil, dacia and other brands that you may have never
    heard of) Plenty of stuff only available by waiting
    for years, lots of stuff that you'd take for granted
    in the west inexplicably unavailable, not unexceptional
    for 'hamstering' behaviour of a few individuals to 
    cause shortages in for instance toilet paper, light
    bulbs and stockings. Very lively black market. For the
    most part people had fairly healthy food on the table,
    but they were structurally short on things like fruit
    and fresh vegetables out of season.

- your job

  - your job is, unless you are a lucky person and you're
    in some prestigious place probably terribly boring
    tons of layers of bureaucracy slow everything down to 
    a crawl. Procuring the simplest of items required to 
    do your job require endless forms and always at least
    three signatures and two stamps. Promotion is hardly
    ever, and when it happens it tends to ignore your 
    proficiency in favor of someone with better connections.
    On the whole the 'general workforce' takes work for
    granted and produces enough to get by but stellar 
    performances are the exception. If you want to advance
    there is a path, but it leads through the 'party', and
    if you're good at something then doors can be opened
    provided you dance to the tune. If you're in to sports
    then you can go quite far too.

- mentality

  - there is a low-key paranoia that pervades society, 
    don't let you guard down in front of strangers, 
    you never know if they're taking names or informing.
    Everybody knows somebody that knows somebody that
    disappeared, but hardly anybody knows somebody that
    disappeared (and why), but it definitely does happen.
    
  

Anybody from Poland, Russia or one of the other former SovBlock countries is welcome to correct this.