<<Seemed to me the working class were the ones who got the shaft. I visited both Moscow and East Berlin in the late 70's - neither was anywhere near what one might consider a workers paradise.>>
I visited East Berlin in the late 80s and it seemed OK to me. Very quiet compared to West Berlin, but excellent libraries, theatres and opera house. We saw Fledermaus in West Berlin and Cosi Fan Tutte in East Berlin, the quality of the operas was roughly equal, the opera houses were each charming in their own way. There were a lot more people in fancy dress attending in West Berlin and a lot of worker and academic types attending in East Berlin. The ticket prices in the East were a tiny fraction of the ticket prices in the West. It was instantly apparent that the working class had much more access to opera in East Berlin than they did in West Berlin.
We took a river cruise in East Berlin and met a vacationing German woman from Dresden. She was talking about her sailing club. Turned out it was a workers' sailing club from her workplace.
I think you have to consider that Russia, for instance, was utterly devastated in WWII, a war which immensely enriched the U.S.A., caused no damage to its infrastructure, and left it without major commercial rivals for decades. It was a bonanza. While the U.S. encircled Russia with hostile bases and threatened it with missiles built by their Nazi scientists and their (fortunately temporary) atomic monopoly, the U.S.S.R. was forced to divert huge amounts of capital into defence rather than building the "workers' paradise" that you so evidently missed. They did what they could for the working class, but the overarching primary need of the working class was not "paradise" but self-defence against U.S. aggression and imperialism.
