I see a lot of positive stories here, and I feel like there was a lot going on that is not so funny and positive. I'm Bulgarian, but have lived in Russia as well. There were food shortages: my parents and grandparents would have to take turns at a line over the course of a day, sometimes overnight to get sunflower oil (the one and only oil, one single brand). Speaking of brands and competitive economy: there was none. You had one brand of each product and sometimes this product was in stock, sometimes it wasn't. One brand of dishwashing detergent, one brand of matches, one brand of skin lotion. No quality competition.

Which also means that what you had at home, everybody else did. What clothes you bought, everybody esle wore too. So whenever my family went to visit some friends, they might have the same cupboards, or the same plates, or the same doors, or the same carpets, or the same sweaters, and us kids might play with toys that I had at home. So if you wanted different looking clothes, you'd have to have them tailored.

You could not buy really common things, like oranges, bananas, jeans, etc, and definitely NOTHING made abroad. Few people could sneak a magazine or a Beatles record through the border and those would be passed around until they fell apart.

A lot of people did not feel comfortable discussing the party among even the closest of friends: you never know who'd turn out to be a snitch, and this is no exaggeration, my great-grandfather was opposed to the communism regime when it first came to the country in 1944, he did not want to give up his land to the party (to form collectives - an initiative that destroyed life in villages and created chaos when it finally came to an end in 1989) and in general was opposed to the idea. He was killed as a result. But because of that, his whole family were declared "public enemies" - their land was taken away from them anyway, my grandfather was denied education, and he spent a great deal of his youth in jail and work camps (which is just a bit better than a concentration camp) for criticizing the party and the fuckupedness of the communist regime.

A classmate of my mom's got hold of a pair of jeans, he wore them to school one day. And she said that the boy never came to school again. Hell, they never saw him again at all, period. That's back in the sixties, when the party still had a strong hold of everybody's life. In the 80s people had had it, so it was a lot easier and people were not as paranoid.

What else... I remember that each student would get two clementines on the last day before Christmas break and it was the biggest deal to go home and eat them. Jesus Christ, I still think about it every once in a while. Freaking clementines!

People could not just pack up and go abroad, the requirements were so stringent that very few could travel, mostly members of the party or others who had enough money to bribe officials.

Oh yeah, while we're at it, bribes were HUGE... You could not get a single simple thing done without bribes. Which is something that over the 45 years of communism got so embedded in people's minds and in Bulgarian culture as a whole, that even today it's still an immense problem.

You could not only not go out of the country, you could not move to another town without the permission of the party, which was almost never granted. The only way you could do that is if the party assigned a job for you in a different town, or if you got married. Or, again, if you had enough money to bribe whoever little fuck was responsible for whatever paperwork.

You could never buy anything foreign, listen to anything foreign, eat anything foreign, jesus nothing. Lest it's Russian or made in other well-sanctioned and communist-friendly countries... Oh yeah, to those you could travel more easily.

That's just the tip of the iceberg, I remember crying because I could never have a Kinder egg (They were sold in special super fancy stores called Kore-Kom, where you could only shop with dollars, but hey ho - here's the trick: you could not BUY dollars anywhere! If you went to a bank, they'd either not have any, or they'd ask you why you need them, and refuse or whatever). I had my first Kinder egg after the communist regime fell... stupid Kinder eggs and clementines, man!

Anyway, that's about it. My rant. Bear in mind that people's stories vary greatly. My closest friend's family was very tight with the party, her grandfather was a spy of all things - though I'm not sure if he ever had any first-hand experience, but either way, she - and her family - never had to go through what my family went through. Occasionally we even have fights about it because she thinks that communism was all roses and rainbows and that people complaining about it is just them making up stories.