Other way around, majority of defectors actually favoured the political system, it was the poverty following WW2 that encouraged most.
In fact, in East Germany after they restored the economy, more people fled from west to east than the other way around. These places weren't actually dictatorships, that's common propaganda, they just had a different system from the west which is known as democratic centralism.
You had more elections under socialism than you did in the west since they used a delegate model instead of a party model.
