‘Shock therapy’, or rapid mass privatisation, in the former Soviet bloc 1990s was responsible for the early deaths of 1m people. This is the principal conclusion of a paper published in the medical journal The Lancet (15.01.09).

The paper is entitled Mass privatisation and the post-communist mortality crisis: a cross-national analysis, by David Stuckler, Lawrence King and Martin McKee.Their work is a serious scientific study. It makes devastating reading. They analysed the deaths of 3m working-age men in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe. Their findings are that at least a third were victims of mass privatisation, which led to widespread unemployment and social disruption.

The authors outlined their method as follows: “We defined mass privatisation programmes as transferring at least 25% of large state-owned enterprises to the private sector within 2 years with the use of vouchers and give-aways to firm insiders. To isolate the effect of mass privatisation, we used models to control for price and trade liberalisation, income change, initial country conditions, structural predispositions to higher mortality, and other potential confounders.”

They concluded: “Rapid mass privatisation as an economic transition strategy was a crucial determinant of differences in adult mortality trends in post-communist countries; the effect of privatisation was reduced if social capital was high.”

The point about social capital means that, not only did privatisation devastate the economy and the means of feeding, clothing and housing their people; it also shredded the social welfare system and all the social support mechanisms built up over decades. As a result unemployed, desperate people with no hope just went to pieces.

Mr McKee emphasised that death came from:

• poor diet
• the inadequate healthcare system
• alcohol poisoning.

This last was the most important immediate explanation for the surge in deaths. However, he said redundancies, particularly among the less well educated and those without forms of social support, was one of the main underlying reasons for these early deaths.