Clearly, the opinion polls were all tampered with to look positive, or if they weren’t tampered with then the respondents answered positively because they feared punishment, or if they didn’t fear punishment then it’s because the state schools and propaganda brainwashed them.

As one anticommunist intellectual solemnly said:

Bolshevism could maintain its social illusion only because its deceived population lacked any opportunity for comparison. When one has lived for 25 years in a dark cellar a kerosene lamp looks like the sun, and for those who were citizens for twenty‐five years of the so‐called Soviet Union, the most dreadful hovel seemed a palace and a piece of bread the food of the gods, since he heard every day that those in non‐Bolshevist countries did not get anything to eat at all. Moscow was a world to itself.