I think your view is a tad optimistic. Many people had difficult lives just because they didn’t want to be members of the party. Thier kids didn’t get to good schools, or got to the one 30 minutes by train, they lost jobs and were forced to dry laundry with engineering degrees.

There was even a joke about this:

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In Poland, during the times of hard socialism, a math associate professor calculated that a shipyard worker earned three times more than he did. So he thought “screw this,” crossed out the titles before and after his name, and went to work in a factory.

Of course, he was doing well in the factory — he didn’t strain himself too much and earned three times more than at the school. Then the factory introduced an evening school for workers, with the promise that whoever attended would get a raise. So the associate professor signed up and started going.

On the very first lesson — bam — mathematics. The level was like the first year of high school, so the associate professor was just dozing off, not paying attention. The teacher noticed him, called him up to the board, and asked him to calculate the area of a circle.

The professor started writing, but for the life of him couldn’t remember the formula for the area of a circle. So he decided to derive it. He wrote the conversion to polar coordinates, then integrated it, and ended up with –πr². So he stood there, wondering where the minus sign had come from.

And from the back row, someone whispered: “Reverse the integration interval.”

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Also, behold, people queueing for toilet paper in 88 in Czechoslovakia: https://youtu.be/O6qUqFy2FEU

I live near a port and dock workers there make a quarter of a million dollars a year along with great benefits, meanwhile the majority of professors these days are adjuncts who aren't even university employees lol

>were forced to dry laundry with engineering degrees.

This sort of thing is happening in the states. Maybe we're the commies now.

1) maybe it was different in 50's, 60's, when I was around, plenty of profs at the university were non-communists in 1989. The communists as a percentage of working population was always low (<11%?), so what you suggest could not have been a generally applied rule, the math just does not work. I assume if you wanted to get to a leading position in a plant/office/university, you needed to be communist. If you refused, that typically meant no promotion. You must have really pissed off the local party boss if it came to your kids could not get to good school. Never a smart move. Probably not a smart move to piss off Irwings if you live in New Brunswick, Canada, either.

2) jokes are jokes, exxagerating a kernel of truth to the point of absurdity is what makes the joke. The truth is, the salary of prof was never anything special, but was marginally better than the salary of average worker. There were some highly (i.e. 2x, maybe even 3x?, salary scales overall were really flat) paid worker occupations, miners were one of them (maybe due to work hazard). The way to get the luxuries was not through money, but through connections (yes, mostly communistic ones).

3) shit happens (the accompanying text talks about a fire in the main/only paper-mill making toilet paper in Czechoslovakia), there were queues when the rumor spread 'there will be bananas in the local fruit&vegetables shop'. There were people panic buying toilet paper at the start of COVID also, maybe its a local specialty :-)

One anecdote I remember from my youth was people routinely taking their windshield wipers off when parking somewhere out (those were notoriously in short supply and easy to steal). So yes, there were supply problems, no rose glasses, but nothing extreme.

As with everything, there is too much polarization: some people remember only the bad stuff and it was a hell on earth for them, others remember only the good stuff and emphasize that. As always, the truth is in between.