Hey, guys, we were the 3rd political superpower in the world!
(Yugoslavia was the leader of the 3rd world countries - Nesvrstane zemlje). Now tell me it was not good:
I live in croatia too. I'm not a yugo-nostalgičar
but definitely the "enlightened" communism like it was in Yugoslavia is a pretty good regime to live in and it was "just like" in civ.
You had production in whole country (not just a "productive core"), it was not "so good" like the huge industrial centres like Ruhr in Germany but people got jobs everywhere. Every city had at least one factory. Corruption was low like in civ3 but not non-existent (like democracy is not corrupted, riiight). And we supported a LARGE military (from which we suffered in 1990s).
Personal money was low, but, actually, you don't need that much money after all.
Example: vacation. Nowadays you need much money for vacation. Then, every company had a "vacation centre" on seaside. For almost free.
Example: cars. Nowadays, we buy expensive imported cars. Then, you could get a WV car from the Sarajevo factory (if im not mistaken) for low price. Remember Yugo? Its our brand too. Got pretty decent in late 1980s (Florida model).
Research was great too. We had our own computers, several companies built computers on their own. Microchips, processors, everything. Not very powerful but they were *moderately advanced* for the time being.
All in all, you cannot pick a commodity that we did not produce on our own. clothing, food, cars, music, electronics, gadgets, trains, oil, fish, furniture, you name it. We even had manufacturing licences of famous western companies like Levi's, Volkswagen, Braun etc. And, yes, we could (and did) watch hollywood movies, listened to western music, there were hippies, punkers, rockers. Our discographic houses made licenced copies of almost all western music available. For example. The early Jean Michell Jarre albums (Oxygene, Equinoxe) from the PGP RTB (belgrade discogr. house) is *the* most wanted by fans. Good quailty and very very rare.