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The transition to a market economy went very well for most of the former Soviet Republics except Russia. https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/03/16/the-tr

• thrown_22 4y ago
  And yet populations are collapsing in every former communist state. I don't know what you call it when a country loses 10% of it's population, like Ukraine did, but decimation is the dictionary definition.
  • iknowstuff 4y ago
    Uh you might want to re-read that definition.
    • d0mine 4y ago
      "the killing of one in every ten of a group of people as a punishment for the whole group (originally with reference to a mutinous Roman legion)." 10% is "one in every ten"
    • unmole 4y ago
      decimation /dɛsɪˈmeɪʃ(ə)n/ (noun) the killing of one in every ten of a group of people as a punishment for the whole group (originally with reference to a mutinous Roman legion).
• einpoklum 4y ago
  Tell that to people in Belarus or Ukraine (not talking about the situation since 2014), Kazakhstan etc. Not sure about the situation in the others. A post talking about "GDP per capita" rather than what people's lives are like is kind of a joke.
  • cezart 4y ago
    You can add Moldova to the list. Yes, now the people have well wealthier lifestyles than during he soviet period, and overall the direction seems optimist. But going from a postcard republic of sorts, to literally the poorest country in Europe, the transition has heavily bruised many people's faiths.
    • cpursley 4y ago
      Yeah, Moldova is an order of magnitude worse-off now: https://youtu.be/wnDxHTaeNX0 https://youtu.be/wnDxHTaeNX0
      • sam_lowry_ 4y ago
        Fraud and incompetence are the reason as much as political changes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Moldovan_bank_fraud_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Moldovan_bank_fraud_sca...
  • cpursley 4y ago
    Fwiw, Russian PPP is not far behind Germany.
    • morsch 4y ago
      https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=RU-DE-US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...
• insane_dreamer 4y ago
  Yeltsin is very much to blame. Russia would have transitioned much better if Gorbachev had been the head of the post-USSR Russia instead of Yeltsin. That said, the former Soviet Republics that transitioned well are those that were smaller, already edging their way towards a market economy before the USSR collapse, and received substantial help from (and eventually joined) the EU (Baltics, Hungary, Poland, Czech Rep., Slovenia), and in the case of E.Germany, unification. I don't think most of the others have fared that well. GDP/Capita is not a good measure because it doesn't take inequality into account.
  • starik36 4y ago
    > much better if Gorbachev had been the head of the post-USSR Russia Gorbachev wanted to keep USSR intact. He didn't want a post-USSR Russia. He initiated referendums to that end. But USSR was already on the train to dissolution and nothing was going to stop it.
    • insane_dreamer 4y ago
      He wanted to keep the USSR intact but also understood that was no longer an option. I'm sure he would have accepted to be PM of Russia but he was considered part of the "communist regime" and wasn't the one standing on the tanks (lets ignore the fact that Yeltin was also part of the communist regime), so that didn't happen.
    • gumby 4y ago
      > Gorbachev wanted to keep USSR intact. Indeed. He didn't weigh in on the current debacle but he praised Putin's seizure of Crimea. He was a product of his upbringing and honestly he always seemed like a weak player to me -- but really I have no idea how difficult it might have been to bring off the reforms he did under Andropov, Chernenko and then his own premiership.
  • groby_b 4y ago
    You're aware that the "much better" transition of the GDR was still a giant disaster, yes?(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15487733.2020.1792619 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15487733.2020.1...) And the GDR still got the best deal of all of the ones you mentioned. But there's massive inequality, massive unemployment. (And as a result, extremism, political fatigue, corruption, etc)
• mromanuk 4y ago
  Except Russia and except Ukraine, which was 90% of the URSS GDP
• coldtea 4y ago
  >The transition to a market economy went very well for most of the former Soviet Republics except Russia That might be what it writes in the link, it wasn't the case though, except if you mean after things stabilized 15 and 20 years later (and it's still bad in most places). Tons of conflict, forced migration, poverty, crime, sexual slavery, and so on...
  • hestefisk 4y ago
    Exactly. Countries like Poland and Hungary have huge social issues and struggle with corruption. A lot of political research points to the recent rise in fascist nationalism in these two countries as caused by being thrown from one political ideology to another (e.g. “communism” to ironfisted neoliberalism / Washington Consensus). It’s pretty evident none of them worked. If anything the country that was LEAST worse off following the fall of the iron curtain was DDR / East Germany simply because they were already miles ahead any other former Warsaw Pact country in terms of productivity. However, if you compare them to West Germany they were quite poor, with some differences in wealth and relative household income still evident at least 10 years ago.
    • catominor 4y ago
      The DDR/BDR wealth/income divide is still significant, even today and in spite of the government's fairly aggressive taxes explicitly earmarked to develop the former DDR.
      • testrun 4y ago
        And if you compare current eastern Germany as opposed to the DDR, current inhabitants have it so much better. Another group that did not improve are the stans (Kazakstan and related countries).
        • petre 4y ago
          They're all run by lifelong presidents, with the exception of Kyrgystan, which is now basically a Chinese colony. So no real democracy there.
• marcinzm 4y ago
  I was in Poland in the late 90s and there were fairly large economic issues with a lack of job projects for many people. This in turn resulted in fairly high rates of crime as it was one of the more guaranteed ways to make a living if you were young. Many other people left the country to make money which in the long turn led to some of the Brexit issues. I literally didn't meet a single person, including myself, who wasn't burglarized or mugged at least once. Four point locks and steel doors were the norm for apartments and houses (and that didn't always help).
  • justsomehnguy 4y ago
    > Four point locks and steel doors were the norm for apartments and houses (and that didn't always help). Because whose who installed them of course now knew where are someone with something worth protecting with a steel doors.
    • filoleg 4y ago
      It wasn't only for the rich and wealthy (or those who had anything valuable at all) even in the slightest in some of the Eastern European countries at that time. If you look at houses in Compton and see metal bars on the windows, you don't instantly think "man, they must have lots of expensive stuff to steal". Kind of the same deal here.
      • justsomehnguy 4y ago
        Yeah, and guys who were installing these doors were blindfolded and couldn't see what the stuff the owner of the apartment had.
        • filoleg 4y ago
          Do you genuinely believe that people in eastern europe at the time were so oblivious and naive? I can bet you that on average, they were way more cautious and aware of their surroundings than modern people living in the west are. For once, I don't think that they would consider leaving all of their valuables in front of the front door where everything is visible. Unless installing the front door includes rummaging through the entire apartment, all while the person living there is just standing and smiling. Which, I assure you, isn't how it usually goes. And I am not trying to make it as some attack on people living in the west, I am one of them now myself. It speaks more about how safe and comfortable the modern western life can be, compared to what it was in those eastern european countries back then, that we can afford to be so oblivious to our surroundings and so much less cautious.
• foomatic 4y ago
  > This can be contrasted with traditional market economies where large corporations start off as small companies and become dominant through innovation, growth, and generally meeting consumer demands. Or when the govt sells off public assets ...
• purecoolnesss 4y ago
  yeah I would say maybe the baltics had it good but the rest of former republics had a hard time. Armenia and Azerbaijan had a war, Tajikistan was engulfed in a civil war. Most countries didn't have any real gdp growth till mid 2000s. Central Asia has the same oligarchy as you would picture in Russia and probably much worse. All dictators only changing after the previous dies.
• htowieuro234 4y ago
  It wasn't great even for DDR.
  • pelasaco 4y ago
    regarding DDR, Netflix has a doc, that talks extensively about it.. https://www.netflix.com/de-en/title/81022994 https://www.netflix.com/de-en/title/81022994
• kranke155 4y ago
  Nonsense. A lot of things sound nice in paper but - all the human data I’ve seen (enormous amounts of anecdotes and counter histories) the entire post soviet transition was recklessly managed by Master of the Universe / Friedman types who created one of the great economic catastrophes in human history. One day the real history of those times will be written, but this is not it. Economism is faith based, not a science.
• dmitriid 4y ago
  > The transition to a market economy went very well for most of the former Soviet Republics except Russia. Haha what? There were 15 Soviet Republics. Can you name the "most" of them where the transition went well?
• somenameforme 4y ago
  That article determines a "positive transition" based upon the raw percent growth in unadjusted GDP since 1995, which is dubious. The "value" of that metric is illustrated by referencing one of the 6 Soviet Republics that page "forgot" about: Moldova. Moldova is Europe's poorest country and suffers from widespread poverty, rampant corruption, and is a major source of things like human trafficking of which the government is involved. Yet it's seen an increase of said metric in 250%, so the article must conclude it's been one of the most successful transitions. Handy instance to suffer a bout of amnesia on. --- <tangent> I've started to become increasingly jaded about economic indicators not only because of articles like this, but because of how they are used in general. We seek data on things like economies not because those numbers matter whatsoever, but because those numbers are supposed to reflect of an objective measurement of the quality of life of people living under that economy. In effect, it's an effort to create objective metrics to try to impartially answer subjective questions. But it ultimately fails, because subjective determination is going to be based on a practically infinite number of metrics, many of which may be immeasurable. So why not simply ask the people? Should we not be aiming to maximize e.g. contentedness/capita instead of GDP/capita and just hoping it leads to the former, somehow? Of course that's a far harder metric to maximize, but that's the whole point. Just doing everything to maximize one metric's value and then waving a "Mission Accomplished" banner clearly is not getting the job done. </tangent>
• blahedo 4y ago
  Did you just explain to someone from a communist-bloc country, who had just said how badly the transition went in their country, that the transition had actually gone well? This is a cousin to both mansplaining and gaslighting, and if we want good, lively discussion on HN we should try to be careful to avoid it. The gp comment gave some very specific and relevant comments about economic upheavals in the late Gorbachev period and deserves better than a well-actually.
  • UweSchmidt 4y ago
    "Did you just..." is the phrase to avoid when you want a good, lively discussion. OP offered a link and an explanation for some of Russia's trouble: the formation of government-backed oligarchies that prevented a healthy market economy to develop. Not the entire picture, maybe a wrong conclusion, but a valid point nevertheless.