Background: Based on my own experience (lived in Russia, Poland, southern Europe,etc...) and stories from relatives during the height of the cold war, the West's citizenry had a much easier time during the cold war than the former Soviet Block countries.
To be clear - that would not include Yugoslavia, which wasn't part of the Soviet Block though they did side with the USSR in many things. Theirs was a game of playing east vs. west and it benefited their society greatly.
I would like to understand the true state of mind of the people "behind the wall" and how much truth there is to the stories of people "dying" to leave. For example, I know people were literally murdered during escape attempts, but how prevalent was that desire to go throughout the USSR? Were there just as many throughout all regions of the USSR or only on the western side?
If it was true, then any ideas on why the USSR thought running a country as if it was a prison, would work? How much truth is there to the "intelligence" groups internal to the USSR and how easily they could make USSR citizens disappear?
Any thoughts on past lessons with the Russian's that would be useful now to NATO leadership?
The missing ingredient that made running a country like a prison somewhat feasible, at least until stagnation set in, was propaganda. Ceaseless propaganda about how life in the West was horrible for all but the very few rich plutocrats at the top, and how they were scheming to oppress the common people everywhere, seemed to work fairly well.
You may be interested in the two comments I wrote earlier about life in the Soviet Union, based on a very (darkly) amusing book by an Estonian born in 1960, Lauri Vahtre. It's actually translated into English as well, and I very highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys dark comedies and/or reading about life in the Soviet Union, which in my experience tend to be the same thing in the end:
Empire of the absurd: a brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union / foreword by Mart Laar ; [translation from Estonian: Tarmo Heyduck]. Ontario, 2010
This thread in particular deals with Vahtre's insights about traveling outside and within the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc.
And here's something I condensed from his book about how the propaganda worked to make people believe in the system, instead of their eyes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4j2z4n/popular_western_narrative_paints_soviet/