Nice myth. Food wasn't quite provided for free. You did not get quite even basic rations enough to survive even if you were able to get them, further, due to mass exodus from farming to city, buildings were built there, and you had to wait a really long time, sometimes forever, to get a living space by lot.
Similar with a car - it all operated under severe scarcity.
All countries involved, even East Germany, had these problems.
Workers got either in priority to farmers and further others. Except politicians and connected people got theirs first beyond workers.
And some were able to buy it ahead of the queue.
The magical development in the West was driven by really heavy handed subsidies industrial development on already richer area, which USSR just could not afford, and especially not after funding the high military spending.
That notwithstanding some completely broken experiments done in large scale like attempts to farm the steppes in the middle of nowhere, a lot of which was funded by export from the few basket countries which would have otherwise had enough food.
And after a relatively short while, the industrialization effort stalled, a variety of farming related problems appeared due to both mismanagement, bad weather and plagues, countries involved got indebted on bad terms...
I didn't vote but I guess the downvotes are because it calls the parent claim a "myth" and then goes on to agree with it.
The scarcity that made food and housing not free in practice is why monetization (capitalism) ended up being better, which I assume was MikePlacid's point.
Capitalism has problems for sure, but it eliminates scarcity more efficiently than any other system we have tried so far.
Capitalism may share the abundance unevenly, but it still creates it in the first place, which is key.
Workers got either in priority to farmers and further others. Except politicians and connected people got theirs first beyond workers. And some were able to buy it ahead of the queue.
The magical development in the West was driven by really heavy handed subsidies industrial development on already richer area, which USSR just could not afford, and especially not after funding the high military spending. That notwithstanding some completely broken experiments done in large scale like attempts to farm the steppes in the middle of nowhere, a lot of which was funded by export from the few basket countries which would have otherwise had enough food. And after a relatively short while, the industrialization effort stalled, a variety of farming related problems appeared due to both mismanagement, bad weather and plagues, countries involved got indebted on bad terms...
So yeah, it was "free".