14 DAY TRIAL // An Oxford study, published in The Lancet, shows that nearly one million working-aged men and women died in Eastern Europe due to the sudden transition from nation-owned businesses to the private sectors in the years following the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union. Countries that were a former part of the Soviet block took the full force of the downfall, the paper says. The surge of deaths in the early 1990s affected some 25 countries, increasing their death statistics by more than 13 percent.
Most of these countries employed a very aggressive “shock therapy,” the name given to the way their economists understood the need for transition to a market economy. Most of these individuals advocated a very short time frame for the changes, which led to a 56 percent increase in unemployment rates, as uncompetitive state-owned factories became private. Lay-offs were made, in order to increase profit, and citizens found it extremely hard to find another job.
In the Communist era, positions were awarded to students as soon as they left the universities, and everyone had the certainty that the job they were given was theirs for life. When the change in politics happened, all those certainties flew down the drain, and the type of mentality that prompted profit and effectiveness was very hard to integrate by most people.
David Stuckler from Oxford, Dr Lawrence King from Cambridge University, and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine expert professor Martin McKee were the lead researchers in the new study. They looked at statistics supplied by the World Heath Organization (WHO), which detailed the number of deaths in men and women aged between 19 and 59 years. They correlated these numbers with aggressive periods of transition in the 25 countries, and noticed a very tight link, which led them to conclude that more than one million people had lost their lives due to the economic change.
“Our study helps explain the striking differences in mortality in the post-communist world. Countries which pursued rapid privatization, or ‘shock therapy,’ had much greater rises in deaths than countries which followed a more gradual path. Not only did rapid privatization lead to mass unemployment, but also wiped out the social safety nets, which were critical for helping people survive during this turbulent period,” Struckler, who is a researcher from the Department of Sociology at Oxford, concludes.