India was also communist. Just India and China alone is already something like 40% of world population. USSR + Eastern/Central Europe is another 400+ million people. There were also many communist countries in Africa and Asia.
As for the standard of living, I know the realities of communist Poland:
- The "everybody could get a house" is complete falsehood, at least for Poland. In fact, almost no one lived in a house - people lived in small, overcrowded flats (2 rooms for a family of 6, 1 room for a family of 4 were not uncommon), and even getting those shitty flats in drab housing projects required serious sacrifices and often years of waiting in the queue.
- As for higher education, only around 15% of population attended university, and not for the lack of wanting - it was clear that far from anyone could go.
- Healthcare was bad, but probably on par with the general underdevelopment of the country.
- Throught the fifties, people worked 28 days a month - yep, they only had a couple of Sundays off and that was it. The salary they got for such exertion was barely enough to cover rudimentary living expenses. My grandmother had to take a loan to buy a winter coat (to not freeze, not because it was pretty), and she paid that loan off over months. Over time, the living conditions gradually improved, but even in the eighties it was mandatory to work every second Saturday IIRC.
- What's probably most important and probably unimaginable for some who did not live under communism, were that obtaining just basic consumer goods was a challenge at times. Tens of millions of people at times stood for hours every day after work just to buy toilet paper or meat. It was an unimaginable waste of human time and energy.
