Bret Devereaux

I think one of the things that's tricky but vital to grasp is that life in the Soviet Union, for most people, most of the time, was ... fine. Not great, not terrible. There was an enormous amount of grinding systematic bullshit much more than there was Black Marias at the door.https://twitter.com/profmusgrave/status/1390128391299420160 …

if you want people to have a realistic idea of Why Communism Is Bad, Actually, conveying the reality of everyday annoyance and institutional corruption and failure is as or more important as talking about the gulags and the purges.

I had a professor in my undergrad who had been to the Soviet Union for research (being a Russianist) on and off for much of the Cold War (he was quite old, retired during my third year) and he always talked in terms of the availability of basic products.

He kept coming back to empty super-market shelves, or situations where it was hard to find a shoe that fit because some sizes were overproduced and other underproduced, that kind of thing.