I’ve just finished reading ‘The River of Angry Dogs’ by Mira Hamermesh. Part of an ongoing odyssey through the autobiographical literature of World War Two in Europe. More of that another day.

p 273 “With each departure from Poland I was aware of leaving behind a world filled with appalling contradictions. Though it was a country vibrating with intellectual and artistic vigour it presented a sad monochrome world filled with intolerable anomalies. Office typewriters and photocopying machines carried crude identification numbers slapped on with thick paint. Under guard at all times the socialist state’s exclusive control of its property symbolised a rampant bureaucratic paranoia about citizens’ access to even this most commonplace technology…

Well, I would disagree about Poland in the 1970s being a ’socialist state’ (I personally don’t equate repressive totalitarian bureaucracies as being socialist, regardless of how they describe themselves). But the rest of the passage is absolutely spot on. I had forgotten how repressive these countries had been when it came to the control of not just the means of production, but the means of information production.