maybe godsend is too strong a term for a repressive, corrupt military occupation that only ended in 1992.

We have never had a soviet military occupation. You're thinking about Hungary and Czech Republic.

I grew up next to the Polish border. In the 80s, the grocery stores were literally empty and everything had to be bought on the black market. In a country that is fairly agriculturally productive no less.

Don't lecture me on "socialism being a godsend". I saw it with my own eyes. It was a dirty, suffocating, ossified structure where prosperity was a crime, and so was any freedom.

Man I'm Polish, grocery stores have never been empty.

We had martial law between 81 and 83 which made life difficult, as you can imagine a martial law can do, but no one was starving.

I visited places like Cieszyn, Katowice and Sosnowiec when I was a kid, and anything beyond the most basic things had to be bought on the black market.

You could have bread and milk in the official grocery stores, as long as you were willing to rise early and stand in queue. By 10 am, already sold out.

Buying meat, IIRC, was already somewhat of a challenge. The authorities tried to "re-educate" people towards canned fish.

But the black markets were huge. Impressively huge. You could buy a lot of stuff there, plus sometimes peddlers went door-to-door selling stuff from their backpacks.

Yes, it's true. Meat has always been highly trafficked on the black market.

Queues existed, this is also true, but again, those were limited to certain rare periods.