A Boring Dystopia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_therapy_%28economics%29?wprov=sfla1

With the exception of Belarus, the Eastern European states adopted shock therapy. Nearly all of these post-Soviet states suffered deep and prolonged recessions after shock therapy, with poverty increasing more than tenfold. The resulting crisis of the 1990s was twice as intense as the Great Depression in the countries of Western Europe and the United States in the 1930s. The hypothesized one time jump in prices intended as part of shock therapy actually led to a lengthy period of extremely high inflation with a drop in output and subsequent low growth rates.  Shock therapy devalued the modest wealth accumulated by individuals under socialism and amounted to a regressive redistribution of wealth in favor of elites who held non-monetary assets.  Contrary to the expectation of shock therapy proponents, Russia's rapid transition to the market increased corruption, rather than alleviating it.

The cost to human life was profound, as Russia suffered the worst peace time increase in mortality experienced by any industrialized country.  For the years 1987 and 1988, roughly 2% of Russia population lived in poverty (surviving on less than $4 a day), by 1993-1995, it was 50%. According to Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell A. Orenstein, a significant body of scholarship demonstrates that the rapid privatization schemes associated with neoliberal economic reforms did result in poorer health outcomes in former Eastern Bloc countries during the transition to capitalism, with the World Health Organization itself stating "IMF economic reform programs are associated with significantly worsened tuberculosis incidence, prevalence, and mortality rates in post-communist Eastern European and former Soviet countries." They add that Western institutions and economists were indifferent to the consequences of the shock therapy they were advocating as their priorities included permanently dismantling the state socialist system and integrating these countries into the emerging global capitalist economy, and that many citizens of the former Eastern Bloc countries came to believe that Western powers were deliberately inflicting this suffering upon them as punishment for defying Western ideals about liberal democracy and market economics.