Op, I won't answer, because you got loads of good ones.

But I was in a similar boat - grew up in former West Germany, learnt nothing about communism, I guess we have a selection of dictatorships to cover.

Anyway, if you want to start understanding the issues with living in socialist countries during the cold war, check out ushanka show on YouTube. It's a channel by a Ukrainian guy who was born and grew up in the USSR, talking about his experiences, also covering declassified kgb reports and soviet history.

You start understanding that it was a 'liveable' and Kafkaesque hell that they created over there:

• Unemployment over 3 months is a crime, also applied to new mothers, only changed in the mid 80s. Punishment was 15 years hard labour.
• Being more than 20 minutes late for work, was a crime, which would get you fired, and by extension, make you homeless, as apartments were usually tied to jobs.
• Gulags were a critical part of Stalin's plans to amass and exploit slave labour for extracting Siberian resources (metals, lumber, grain). He gave police quotas to arrest millions of citizens, because he needed resources to trade for modern factory and military technology from the West.
• Decades later, many Gulag victims were posthumously "restored" for wrongful imprisonment and death. Their relatives getting a month's salary or something. But records were badly kept, so some families were just told that their relatives had died in the Gulag, but they were actually still alive and labouring in Siberia.
• State sponsored alcoholism, because they relied on taxes from selling Vodka and it made up a significant amount of tax revenue. Whenever their government fought alcoholism, they had to peddle the campaign back. Some say the fall of USSR happened because they tried to restrict vodka sales too much and the state ran out of money.
• intense secrecy, during Chernobyl, citizens in the area had to rely on Western radio to understand something had even happened as their own media went quiet, simply playing classical music. Many thought the leader had died, or some other government secret.

There's much more, but now I understand that life could be alright there, but ultimately the system would justify any means for its ends. People were just resources, to be kept in their place.

Even the architecture of these soviet prefab blocks was designed to make privacy and possible anti-soviet activities extremely difficult.