Taking Stock of Shock

Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions

Bibliographic Data

ID19984869
AuthorsK Ghodsee (0000-0002-9494-3741, University of Pennsylvania), Mitchell A Orenstein (0000-0002-2383-3270, University of Pennsylvania), Mitchell Orenstein (Professor of Russian and East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania), Kristen R Ghodsee
Year2021
Publication date2021-08-17
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueTaking Stock of Shock (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressNew York (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/oso/9780197549230.001.0001
OpenAlexW4206926026
Open LibraryOL34709760M
ISBN9780197549230
LanguageEN
Citations received62

Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book evaluates the social consequences of the post-1989 transition from state socialism to free market capitalism across Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Blending ethnographic accounts with economic, demographic, and public opinion data, it provides insight into the development of new, unequal, social orders. It explores the contradictory narratives on transition promoted by Western international institutions and their opponents, one of qualified success and another of epic catastrophe, and surprisingly shows that data support both narratives, for different countries, regions, and people. While many citizens of the postsocialist countries experienced significant progress in living standards and life satisfaction, enabling them to catch up with the West after a relatively brief recession, others suffered demographic and social collapses resulting from rising economic precarity; large-scale degradation of social welfare that came with privatization; and growing gender, class, and regional disparities that have accompanied neoliberal reforms. Transition recessions lasted for decades in many countries, exceeding the US Great Depression in severity. Some countries still have not returned to pre-1989 levels of economic production or mortality; some have lost more than one-fifth of their population and are projected to lose more. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this book deploys a sweeping array of data from different social science fields to provide a more holistic perspective on the successes and failures of transition while unpacking the failed assumptions and narratives of Western institutions, Eastern policymakers, and citizens of former socialist states

Archaeology · Business · Shock (circulatory) · Stock (firearms) · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Internal Medicine · Medicine · Post-Communist Economic and Political Transition · Urbanization and City Planning · Economic history

Tools

Open DOILibgen