More than 30 years after the collapse of Communist regimes across Central Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia, vigorous scholarly debates about post-Communist socioeconomic transformation persist. Did these countries, on balance, experience relatively successful transitions to capitalism or catastrophic destruction of their human and physical capital? In this important meta-analysis of the economic, demographic, public opinion, and ethnographic evidence produced across the social-science disciplines, Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell Orenstein observe that the answers given often depend on the disciplinary identities and methods of the questioners. They find that economists and some political scientists adhere to a “J-curve perspective,” in which the initial pain of transition eventually paved the way for a new world of progress and opportunity. Anthropologists and qualitative sociologists, however, tell of a “disaster capitalism” that has ruined lives and communities across the region, leading to today’s ethnopopulist backlashes. Ghodsee and Orenstein further argue that the predominance of the J-curve perspective among Western advisors and domestic policy makers has been to the detriment of post-Communist societies. They recommend that scholars and policy makers alike adopt a more holistic “inequality perspective” that acknowledges the complexities of post-Communist experiences.
The initial section on economic evidence lays the groundwork for the rest of the book. It first takes on what the authors view as the misguided neoliberal “shock therapy” approach promoted by economists who advised institutions like the International Monetary Fund in the early years of the transition. This perspective encouraged post-Communist states to liberalize prices, markets, and trade; clamp down on transitional inflation; and privatize state-owned property to make the leap from plan to market as quickly as possible. But, they argue, post-Communist states attempting to follow this advice typically experienced deep recessions, skyrocketing corruption, rapidly rising inequality, and widespread poverty. This led to a belated focus in economics on the importance of institution-building from the mid-1990s onward. The authors then broaden their story by pointing out the crucial role of EU membership paths, geography, and oil prices in determining variations in long-term growth rates across the post-Communist world. Late in the section they return to the main thesis to argue that “two narratives began to grow out of the transition experience, a J-curve narrative of qualified success—a longer-than-expected transitional period but overall success—and a disaster capitalism narrative emphasizing the foreseeable and unacceptable impacts of Western neoliberal reforms” (p. 56).
For Ghodsee and Orenstein adjudicating between these narratives of success and disaster provides the central puzzle and starting point for the rest of the book. They first turn to demography, finding that economic and demographic trends unexpectedly varied independently of one another. Some relatively successful post-Communist countries in terms of GDP (e.g., Poland) experienced massive emigration and falling fertility rates; some of the most economically hard-hit countries experienced the least dramatic declines in life expectancy (e.g., Georgia); while Russia, an average performer economically, had both a sharp drop in life expectancy and a high rate of in-migration. Although they are careful not to draw firm conclusions, they highlight arguments and evidence that “neoliberal economic reforms, and rapid privatization in particular, worsen health outcomes in transition and developing countries” (p. 84) and that the collapse of the Communist-era social contract during the rapid economic transition led to massive out-migration of younger skilled workers and the collapse of fertility rates. In the following section on public opinion, they argue that the destruction of the old social contract and a rising inequality that contradicted socialist-era perceptions of fairness help to explain why post-Communist survey respondents on average expressed lower levels of life satisfaction, support for democracy and the market economy, and trust in public institutions and their fellow citizens in comparison to respondents in Western Europe. In the final and most compelling section, Ghodsee and Orenstein mine the ethnographic literature to draw what they describe as “portraits of desperation” (p. 13). Here they depict a complex landscape of post-Communist inequality, one that is not just cross-national, cross-regional, and economic but also gendered, raced, and classed.
Ghodsee and Orenstein’s book has (at least) three great strengths. First, they have performed an exceptional service in bringing together and critically analyzing such a vast array of literature on post-Communist economic transformations from more than 30 years of research across the social sciences (see also the excellent companion website at https://www.takingstockofshock.com/). This must have been a daunting task, and the result is a well-organized, compact, and accessible book that should from here on out render it impossible—or at least quite embarrassing—for scholars of the region in one discipline to claim ignorance of key findings from the others. Second, their primary focus on the well-documented social consequences of the transformations represents an important corrective to the more typical scholarly emphases on theoretical analysis, elite politics, and economic program design. Third, Ghodsee and Orenstein’s work should reinvigorate what had become a stale debate on shock therapy versus gradualism in post-Communist studies. Because the post-Communist economic transformations were so new and unprecedented, most of the original debate in the 1990s took place on the theoretical level and with highly incomplete information. Ghodsee and Orenstein are right to argue that now, more than 30 years later, it is time to return to the questions that originally motivated this debate and to search for more nuanced, empirically informed answers to them.
The book is at its most provocative when it attempts not only to “take stock” of the varied social consequences of the 1989 revolutions, but to blame the problems that emerged on Western-promoted neoliberal economic reforms and to argue that different Western policies and greater financial support (e.g., a Marshall-like Plan for the region) would have made a crucial difference in post-Communist social outcomes. As counterfactuals Ghodsee and Orenstein also refer approvingly to the alternative economic reform examples of China and Vietnam, who “decided to reform communism more slowly, ushering in a period of dynamic growth and prosperity without deep transitional recessions such as those caused by shock therapy in Eastern Europe” (p. 195). The causal arguments and counterfactuals remain underdeveloped, which is understandable given that the book’s main analytical focus is to systematically identify and assess the range of outcomes rather than to trace the processes through which they occurred. But their overarching call to adopt a more nuanced and empirically grounded inequality perspective in future scholarly analysis and policy design is overwhelmingly supported and extremely timely.
