This is an interesting and good book. Its major strength is the complexity of the analysis in two ways. On the one hand, it analyzes the social consequences of the 1989 revolution from economic, demographic, and ethnographic points of views. The other source of complexity is its geographic breath, covering the entire post-Soviet world, all the post-Soviet states that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the countries of the former Soviet bloc in central Europe and the Balkans. While analyzing the transition of twenty-nine countries from state-socialism to market capitalist democracies, the authors also characterize the differences among the various regions of this huge territory. They present the differences of the transformation among the seven European successor states of the Soviet Union: the five central Asian successor states, the three Baltic countries, the four so-called “Višegrad countries,” and the ten southeast European former state-socialist countries. This is an enormous enterprise.
Readers find a comprehensive picture of the economic consequences of the collapse of state-socialism: the unparalleled tragedy of Russia and Ukraine, together with eight other countries, where, during the 1990s, per capita GDP dropped by roughly 60 percent. On the other hand, in the ten least-affected countries, mostly in central Europe, the decline, as an average, was 25 percent, and only during the first three years of transition. As a tragic consequence, in the first decade of transition, 47 percent of the population of this region declined into poverty. The sharp decline, however, was followed by recovery and development that was stopped again by the 2008–9 economic crisis.
The often-catastrophic economic trend described in the book was accompanied by a tragic demographic crisis. This region experienced the worst population decline in peacetime: it lost about 18 million people, or about 6 percent of its population since 1990. This was caused by mass out-migration, sharp decline of fertility, and dramatic increase of mortality. In the worst affected countries such as Russia, mortality increased by more than 53 percent. Some countries, such as Bulgaria, lost one-fifth of its population. Life expectancy, however, during state-socialism spectacularly increased to 68 years in Russia, 71–72 in Bulgaria and Albania and the Višegrad countries neared the western level. The bumpy road of transformation damaged societies as well. Changing values and norms and extreme corruption shocked society. Social cohesion was undermined. Lost security generated nostalgia for state-socialism. On the other hand, it created the social base for right-wing populist autocratic regimes in Russia and other countries of the region.
After these impressive and excellent analyses, the authors blame the mistaken shock therapy for the unnecessary economic and social pains and dangerous political consequences of transformation. This political conclusion of the analysis is questionable. They often return to the comparison with the rather different Chinese transformation, where reform of communism happened without decline and social suffering, and hundreds of thousands of people were elevated form poverty.
Although one may praise the complexity of the book, the basic shortcoming is still a missing factor of analysis: history. This huge post-communist area exhibits major differences in the historical background of its sub-regions: the Balkans were under Ottoman suppression for more than four hundred years; central Europe belonged to the modernizing Habsburg empire for four hundred years; Russia and most of the other parts of the later Soviet empire were under Mongol occupation for centuries and then under an Asian type of tsarist dictatorship. The Baltic countries, though part of the Soviet Union before independence, were during their long history connected to the German Hansa cities and, for centuries, to Scandinavian countries. Several of the countries of the region never experienced anything other than dictatorial regimes. History matters.
Russia, Serbia, and even Hungary were unable to “return” to democracy because it never existed there. And that makes the Chinese comparison also problematic. Despite avoiding shock therapy, transitional decline, and suffering, the political outcome of transformation in China was rather like the one in Russia: a harsh dictatorial system. The explanation of political developments based only on the mistakes and difficulties of the transformation after 1989 in central and eastern Europe is wrong. Estonia, a former Soviet republic, exhibited one of the most successful transformations. Nowadays it is getting integrated into the Nordic countries and becoming more Scandinavian than east European. Lacking a historical approach, the authors missed an important explanatory factor of post-communist political development of the region.
