Reference no: EM133727679

Please explain - Second (to turn now to a very different illustration), the failure of bureaucratic socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union cannot be fully grasped merely in terms of the economic problems in generating incomes or other results, such as life expectancies. Indeed, in terms of life expectancies, the communist countries often did quite well, relatively speaking (as is readily checked from the demographic statistics of the Soviet Union, pre-reform China, Vietnam and Cuba, among others).

In fact, several of the ex-communist countries now are in a significantly worse position than they were under communist rule-perhaps nowhere more so than in Russia itself (where the life expectancy at birth of Russian men has dropped now to about fifty-eight years-considerably below those in India or Pakistan).5 And yet the population is unwilling to vote to return to the previous arrangements, as election results indicate, and even the new successor parties drawing from that old political quarter do not propose such a return (and only demand rather less radical restitutions).