Without an accompanying welfare state in which social programs funded by a progressive income tax redistribute from the rich to the poor, capitalism … - Kristen R. Ghodsee

Many former socialist citizens, as well as political leaders like Vladimir Putin, believe that the chaos and pain of the transition process was deliberately inflicted by the West on its former enemies, as punishment for the East's long defiance of liberal democratic norms and market freedoms.

Stubborn and perhaps a bit naive, I persisted and spent the late 1990s living and dong research in Eastern Europe, watching firsthand the slow and painful transformation of a state-owned economy into one of unfettered free markets. I observed that women were more likely than men to express a longing for the state socialist past because of the many tangible benefits women lost with the coming of democracy and capitalism. The privatization and liberalization of the economy had disproportionately affected women who lost access to once generous social safety nets that allowed them to more easily combine work and family responsibilities before 1989. Since those early days interviewing chambermaids and receptionists on the Black Sea, I have spent the rest of my career studying the lived experience of state socialism and the effects of postsocialism on ordinary lives in Eastern Europe.

In the mortality belt of the European former Soviet Union, an aggressive health policy intervention might have prevented tens of thousands of excess deaths, or at least generated a different perception of Western intentions. Instead, Western self-congratulatory triumphalism, the political priority to irreversibly destroy the communist system, and the desire to integrate East European economies into the capitalist world at any cost took precedence.