Was it better to be in the Eastern Bloc?

Life was worse under communism. But if we judge the two systems on a longer time scale, it's far from clear the Western one was more successful.

Written by Noah Carl.

Communism failed in Europe, just as it failed elsewhere. It was a grossly inefficient system that could only be maintained through massive coercion, repression and propaganda by the state. When the Berlin Wall came down, the countries of Eastern Europe were substantially poorer than their Western counterparts, and their populations had endured almost half a century without basic civil liberties.¹ I think we can say with some confidence that it was better to be in the Western Bloc.

But what if we judge the two systems on a longer time scale? And what if we use an alternative, perhaps more fundamental metric of success: the extent to which they preserved the peoples and cultures that lived under them.