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Re:The Last Soviet Generation by gumby on Saturday December 25, 2021 @01:25AM (#29680971)
My son had an assistant teacher who’d grown up in the DDR (East Germany). She was really sad that it was gone and felt West Germany was a disaster. She only moved west because her Land (state) was “mismanaged by the Westerners who showed up” so she couldn’t make a living.

An example of one of the tragedies of unification? Her brother had become an entrepreneur and then had to work on Saturdays.

Re:The Last Soviet Generation by paganel on Saturday December 25, 2021 @02:05AM (#29681147)
> Her brother had become an entrepreneur and then had to work on Saturdays.

In the second part of the 1980s (or maybe since the early 1980s? I can't remember exactly, I was just a kid) Ceausescu's regime imposed work on Saturdays, and for some domains even once every two Sundays (like it happened to my dad, who worked in constructions).

One of the first decisions taken in 1990 by the new democratic regime once Ceausescu fell was to eliminate working Saturdays, i.e. to give a full weekend to working people. It's funny cause the newly formed opposition to that new regime (the forerunners of today's centre-right political, liberal forces) were pretty critical of that decision, saying things like "as bad as the Romania's economy left to us by Ceausescu is we need to work more, not less!".