| >one of the best things that came from Eastern Bloc is a high-quality (free) education anyone could have. It was not free at all. It was payed with confiscatory taxes, total lack of freedom to choose anything(some guy will choose what you will do the rest of your life when you are a kid). People in charge made sure their children had the best education with schools that were only for the children of the people in the Party, or the people that lived in the big cities like Moscow, Leningrad, with internal passports that forbid people to move from second-class cities to first class, like in China today. Not to talk about the fact that over 30-40% of the "high quality education" material and time was actually indoctrination in Marxism like also remains in China today. By the way, in the Eastern Block something like 90% of the money went to internal repression(secret services and Police) and the military. Prestigious engineers could only work for the military. And no matter how much educated you were, they could make you lose your job if you did not behave and make you into a garbage collector. I know because I had family members that came from the Eastern Block. And in the rest of Europe, the education in cities like Prague or Warsaw, Budapest was way better before they became occupied. |