That must have been in some completely rural area, as cities were alright for amenities. Commie blocks never were super pretty, but they did have electricity, heating, hot water without a boiler. Shops still poorly stocked though.
Even in the small towns all of these existed (at least in the 80s) and it seemed safe. But still, it didn’t compare to Western Europe's standard of living at all.
Can confirm, when in 1985 we moved to our house in a small (~10k) town, the street it was on didn't even have a water supply to each house, instead everyone had to use a public drawing point in the middle of that street. We had to lay down the piping to our house by ourselves and at our own cost.
The new fangled communist blocks did, but older developments were often left without this, even at the fall of communism. I live in the capital of my country, and 30 years ago a lot of the old town - places that are now the most expensive places to live - were at the time some of the poorest.
It was 8km outside of Białystok, which was a city of 300,000.
Yes, people in the cities did have those things, but compared to the country, you had much more difficulty getting food products. Since we produced those items, we simply made sure the inspectors didn't know about the food we kept for ourselves. The national ration cards were irrelevant to us. It was a pretty terrible time in Poland under communism, even though it did have some positive aspects, overall, it was terribly dehumanizing, at least from my perspective.
Far from everybody lived in commie blocks. And commie blocks varied widely from what you think as commie block in a major city to a weird things with missing and/or ad-hoc utilities in rural parts.
And commie regimes tried to stop people from moving to cities to have enough workforce to work in terribly inefficient farms. So rural parts made up much much bigger part of population.
