It can be really hard to understand how a different political system can be seen as good by someone living in it. Especially without calling people brainwashed for thinking so.

This novel does a good job of showing how it is possible and how it depends on who and where you are in the system (even if you are just an unimportant worker) as well as how you can be worse of in the new system deemed as "better".  
Even if the novel is good at showing the atrocities of the soviet system, it still shows how some regular people could also have a good life, and those lives were changed for the worse following the collapse of the Soviet union. 

It never tries to "both sides" it, but it does succeed in getting you to understand why some people even today miss their lives in the soviet union, and also we're fae away from the atrocities we know happened.

Also, a lot of funny jokes about the Romanian leader.