Top 5 Communist Myths

Communism in the Soviet Union is applauded to this day by proponents of Marxist ideology for the benefits it supposedly brought to society. Below, I will outline the top five myths about communism in the USSR from my empirical standpoint as a Romanian living in the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Romania.

I. Everybody Had a Job

While it is true that unemployment in the Socialist Republic of Romania was almost non-existent, this was because there was no private sector. As such, the socialist government would create superficial, unproductive jobs only as means to ‘give people a job’ and fulfil the state’s quota. 

This meant that many factories would run for years on a deficit. Of course, those that did make a profit would then have no funds to invest into new technology, as most surplus cash was diverted to pay the unneeded workers.

In this light, it makes sense that in Romania such Soviet-era sayings as ‘you’re hired to cut leaves for the dogs’ are still used to describe those whose professions are useless. 

II.  Everybody Had Money, and Could Buy Anything They Wanted

Since all Romanians under the Eastern Bloc “had a job,” it makes sense that everybody also had money to spend. But since a large chunk of industry operated at a deficit, we might ask why didn’t the economy collapse? The government may be able to print money, but it certainly can’t print the stuff that people buy with that money. So how did communist society function?

The reason that the economy did not crash was that every citizen had a ration card allowing one to buy essentials such as oil, bread, and gas. Along with exponential shortages of every kind of product, this caused many people to be unable to spend their money, which, in effect, was completely useless unless you had a stamp card (the QR code of that era).

III. Romania’s Agriculture Was Flourishing

This is mostly a statistical trick as most people measured Romania’s agricultural prosperity on the quantity of agricultural goods exported from the country under communism. What they fail to take into account, however, is that while Romania was indeed exporting immense quantities of food towards other nations, it was only doing so by starving its own people through means of rationing. 

Last year alone Romania harvested over 11 million tonnes of grain. The record-breaking harvest under communism, however, was 8.5 million tonnes.

IV. Everyone Had a Home

Nobody in the Socialist Republic of Romania actually owned their home, you could only ‘rent one’ from the state. This meant that the government could kick you out any time and for any reason; or force you to move, a practice that was done quite often in the later years as workers were forced to move from the villages to the city to live in far poorer conditions and a lifestyle which they had difficulty adapting to.

Under communism, most abodes in Romania were the size of a small university dorm, and in those houses, you could have families of up to six people in residence. No citizen was allowed to ‘own’ two homes, and any person who happened to own two homes due to inheritance would be forced to sell one right away regardless of whether they fetched a good price for their property or not. Still, ‘owning’ one’s own home was not an option: you only sold the right for a person to live there, the house was still owned by the state.

The reality was that people who were ‘given’ a house were also the people the state deemed worthy of contributing to the nation’s ‘progress’. This condition led to copious amounts of corruption as people received homes from the state apparatchiks through favouritism or nepotism.

V. There Were Lower Crime Rates

During communism, no crime was reported by the state-controlled media. As such, the illusion that everything was safe existed as a falsehood in the minds of the people. My grandmother, for example, would sleep with the door unlocked, and sometimes when the weather was hot she would even sleep with the door open to create a through-draft as we had no access to air conditioning.

After the Socialist Republic fell in 1989, however, most TV stations became inundated with reports of rapes and murders in order to shock the population and produce higher ratings. This caused people like my grandmother, believing Romania had suddenly become an extremely dangerous place, not just to lock the door but to actually barricade it every night by pushing a sewing machine in front of it.

Today this shows how well the mainstream media can manipulate people with its reporting. Rates of crime in Romania were in fact much higher under communism, especially since the government was more concerned with cracking down on ideological crime rather than actual crime. As such, and unbeknownst to Romanians who did not experience it, murders, theft, muggings, and kidnappings were rife.

Regrettably, many people in Romania and around the world continue to believe that life under communism was good. This can be pointed to the fact that they did not live in those times, and the aftertaste of Soviet state propaganda published by state-owned media continues to linger. 

To those who believe life was better under communism, why were the borders closed? Why were people not allowed to leave? And most importantly, why were people not interested in immigrating and living here? Whatever the case, Romania is certainly better now than it was then. 

A Romanian persecuted for trying to put smiles on people's faces. Took over This Week in Stupid (TWIS) video series. Follow RomanianTVee on YouTube.