Changes

==Key restrictions introduced: civil, media, speech, information and travelling restrictions==

Communist regimes in the Eastern Bloc viewed marginal groups of opposition intellectuals as a potential threat because of the basis underlying Communist power therein. The Block considered the suppression of any dissidence and opposition a central prerequisite to retain its power, in spite of the enormous expenses required in order to keep certain countries population under secret surveillance. Following a totalitarian initial phase, a post-totalitarian period followed the death of Stalin in which the primary method of Communist rule shifted from mass terror to selective key repression, along with ideological and sociopolitical strategies of legitimation and securing of loyalty. <ref>Political and civil restrictions: purges and show trials - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Bloc_politics</ref>A large number of people were executed or died in custody during the newly established communist People's Republics existence, most during the Stalinist era of the 1950s. While judicial executions between 1945 and 1964 numbered several thousand, deaths in custody were estimated in the hundreds of thousands and even totaled millions. Many more were imprisoned for political, economical or other reasons and suffered abuse, torture and often death in specially established Labour Camps.