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.
How is that evident, though? It’s actually pretty clear that the quality of life has drastically improved in most of these countries. Of *course* you can always find some group who is suffering. But there is no way I would want to live in 1980s Poland, Estonia, etc vs 2020. For example:
It has improved significantly in the last 20 years. But the 90’s were as bad if not worse than in Russia in most places. And Russia was on an upwards trend until the 2010’s as well, e.g. if we look at average income levels the Baltic states only overtook Russia around ~2014.
And if we only focus ex-USSR countries, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia seem more like the exceptions than the rule. Basically every single country besides them did much worse than Russia (unless like it they had a large amount of natural resources)
Well close to 300 million people lived in the USSR. Only 8 million of them lived in the Baltic states.
I still personally think the (mostly) peaceful dissolution of the USSR was probably one the best things that happened in the past 100 years. But transition to capitalism was extremely mismanaged, even in the “successful” countries.
Washington consensus-style capitalism / Reaganite neoliberalism was not good for most countries. A good example is how the Russian economy responded to excessive privatisation instead of building a strong public sector that builds and supports private enterprise (similar to the US, although neoliberal scholars don’t like admitting it). The track record is the same in a lot of Latin-American countries where IMF and WTO imposed similar doctrines. I’m mostly for free markets etc, but it wasn’t appropriate to expect countries such as Poland with a “plastic” economy (political economy as the communist like labelling it) to succeed with a neoliberal anti-government “libertarianism” ideology overnight. It just doesn’t work that way. Stiglitz even wrote a book on the topic.
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.
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).
Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are doing great really, even if the Polish government is anti-EU sometimes. According to latest statistics Estonia has better education system, economic growth and birth rate than Finland. The rate at which these countries have catch up is amazing.
What I'm most worried of now are old, historically rich countries in decline, like Italy and Spain.
