quality:correction, structural:expansion, information:classification
Economic decline, hunger, and excess mortality

In the decades following the end of the Cold War, only five or six of the post-Soviet states are on a path to joining the wealthy capitalist states of the West, and most are falling behind, some to such an extent that over 50 years will be needed before they catch up to how they were before the end of communism. However, virtually all the former Soviet republics were able to turn their economies around and increase GDP to multiple times what it was under the USSR. In a 2001 study by the economist Steven Rosefielde, he calculated that there were 3.4 million premature deaths in Russia from 1990 to 1998, which he partly blames on the "shock therapy" that came with the Washington Consensus. Nearly all of the post-Soviet states suffered deep and prolonged recessions after shock therapy, with poverty increasing more than tenfold. Catastrophic drops in caloric intake followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union.