[gessha]

The Soviet electronics manufacturing and the politics around it were very interesting. Somebody else in the thread recommended the Asianometry video, go watch it.

As for repressions, intellectuals getting censored, assasinated even [1].

Turkic and Roma populations getting forcibly assimilated [2].

Numerous personal accounts of asset seizure and blatant corruption among party members.

Is that repression to call it out or just enough to fall below the threshold?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi_Markov

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todor_Zhivkov

[thriftwy]

I don't know. You can find targeted assasinations done abroad by democratic regimes these days. Israel kills Iranian nuclear scientists more or less routinely. I mean, yes, that is tragic, but we have worse shit tolerated on our planet in the age XXI. Number of people affected is also expected to be fairly low.

With regards to forcible assimilations, I believe France, Denmark and Turkey did more or less the same stuff in the time frame. These are all democratic, capitalist NATO-member countries which are not always in the same sentence with "repressive". Again, that is tragic, but I wonder if most countries in the world aren't having worse contemporary skeletons in their closets.

I'm not challenging the actual grinding of people between state gears, just the myopic outlook where it is customary to use it against certain regimes' life experience but not others. People are conditioned to assume it was a torment to live in Bulgaria in 1980. The same people don't assume it was a torment to live in contemporary Turkey. In practice, both had their highs and lows.

With regards to asset seizure, I don't believe you were supposed to have any under socialism.