Too bad to read this - under Communism, corruption was bad, but “ethical”. We used to send items to relatives living in a SSR. We quickly learned that if you sent something, it would get “lost”. However, if you sent TWO identical items, one of them would always get delivered! It would have been just as easy for the customs inspectors to steal both...
They were probably too lazy to steal two things in one day. My dad was a mail carrier, so I won’t make any comparisons to the US Postal service.