CharlieSheen comments on George Orwell's Prelude on Politics Is The Mind Killer - Less Wrong
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Most of the time in the USSR after Stalin's death or Communist Yugoslavia being too critical of the reigning ideology just got you fired, passed up for promotion, a failing grade on your essay, charged with what is basically hate speech (freedom of speech was constitutionally guaranteed in the USSR btw), be considered mentally ill, denied a vacation request or put you on a watch list or under surveillance by an intelligence agency.
The difference is pretty clearly of degree not kind.
But I generally agree that the bloodbaths that where Communism and National Socialism in the 20th century where much more oppressive than Democracy.
This was essentially imprisonment and incapacitation without trial for dissenters. You got locked up and basically tortured.
Yes and if you are today considered dangerous and mentally ill and you actually aren't your experience is different... how?
What I'm hinting at is that slowly but surely dissent from the prevailing ideology in the West is being medicalised. We aren't exactly talking about sluggishly progressing schizophrenia yet. But I can easily imagine someone being locked up and treated for say their "sexism" or "racism" in twenty years time. This is far from a new thing in Western intellectual trends either, sixty years ago The Authoritarian Personality was basically a political attack implicitly trying to establish certain political opinions and preferences the result of pathology (which also implies treatment or prevention as normative).
The time we are talking about was not "after Stalin's death".