Tim Worstall manages to find yet another gem from the Grauniad. Neil Clark manages to make the astonishing claim that Eastern Europeans were better off under communist rule. Like Tim I do wonder whether Mr Clark ever visited Eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall collapsed? I admit I only visited the Soviet Union before the collpase but as well as the USSR I did visit Hungary and Romania (and Yugoslavia FWIW) shortly afterwards in the summer of 1990 and there I met a lot of people who had fresh memories of the communist past. Mr Clark talks about the E European levels of output and how they contracted in the new era. There is a good reason for that, the majority of the industrial output in communist times was, when it existied and wasn't a paper fraud, of exedingly low quality. The jokes about Skoda cars or Trabants had a basis in reality as did the jokes about queues and the bitterly ironic "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".
While I was at university in the late 1980s I helped guide some Moscow students around when they visited the UK as part of an exchange. I also visited Leningrad (as it was then) and Moscow in return. What impressed these visitors the most, and what depressed me the most on my visits, was the little things. For example the completely different attitude to grocery shopping. I recall taking a couple of the students with me to the local supermarket and they were completely and utterly amazed. The first thing that amazed them was the amount of stuff on offer. One thing that truly blew them away what that there was not just a handful of tomatoes (it was November) but box after box of them. They wanted to know if tomatoes grew in England in November (no) and how come they were so cheap? Then wondered why fresh tomatoes were being bought and wondered whther tinned ones were available as well since they should be cheaper. When I led them over to the tinned vegetable row their amazement increased multifold. Not only were there shelves and shelves of tinned tomatoes, there were different varieties: whole ones, pureed ones, sliced ones etc. and they were produced by different people. Why, they wondered did people have to choose between Sainsbury's own and two different branded sorts? why would anyone buy anythng but the cheapest Sainsbury ones. Why were there different types? surely you could make the pureed and sliced ones out of the whole ones? and so on.
My spring visit to Russia was the reverse. Although Glasnost and Perestroika had permitted peasant farmers to have market stalls selling produce there wasn't much of it available. There were no tomatoes or cucumbers to be had - not even for ready money - not even for ready Dollars or D-marks. Staples such as bread or potatoes could be hard to come by, even for relatively affluent students. There was no concept of having white bread or wholegrain or large loaves or small ones, you bought your (kilo I think) of bread in a single loaf. It was made of whatever flour happened to be available and baking happened once a day. If they ran out they wouldn't bake any more even if the ingredients were available. The same, only more so, applied to other consumer goods. Forget Televisions, simple things like walkmen or indeed almost anything battery operated were not made. Home computers? Fax Machines? CD players? hollow laugh. The tomato story was repeated by a colleague of mine who took his guests on a walk around the town. He wanted to show them things like historical buildings and other touristy things, they were more interested in Dixons or Top Shop. Even down market shops such as Woolworths were amazing to them.
There is no way I believe that such a society has higher average living standards or quality of life - even if you ignore the prospect of the visit by "friendly" secret policemen. Oh and Romania, by the way, was worse. Despite people saying that they thought things were better in Romania in 1990 than under Ceaucescu it was pretty dire to me. Entire villages lacked basic services like electricity or paved roads, the prefered mode of transport in some areas appeared to be an oxcart and the plight of the "orphans" (dumped in their orphanages mostly because their parents simply could not feed or clothe them) was indescibably tragic. Somehow I think Romania's orphans were ignored by Neil Clark in his praise of communism. Of course we can tell where he is comng from when he recommends 1970s Austria as a model that all should aspire to.