Thread by @subindennis

Gorbachev was a criminal. The destruction (by him, Yeltsin and others) of a system that ensured hardly anybody went hungry was a crime against humanity. In post-Soviet Russia, mortality rates rose sharply; there were at least 3 million excess deaths - a veritable genocide.

Rampant inflation following the lifting of price controls and destruction of USSR led to millions of people losing their life savings. A third of the Russian population fell below the poverty line. Industrial production contracted by 60% in 1990-99; GDP fell by 54%. #Gorbachev

"Adult female mortality rates rose from 116 per 1000 in 1990 to 178 in 1994; adult male mortality rates increased from 316 to 486. Mortality rates in Russia started declining significantly only after 2005, but even in 2014, mortality rates were higher than in 1990." #Gorbachev

The quote and graph on mortality in post-Soviet Russia are from this article I wrote in 2017.

#Gorbachev

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As economist Arindam Banerjee (@arindambn) points out in a 2020 paper, "The drastic withdrawal of food subsidies [in post-Soviet Russia] was directly related to high mortality rates, akin to a famine-like situation, something not well-recognized in the literature..." (cont'd)

"The total decline in demand for food grains in the former Soviet Union (FSU) during 1990-99 was a gigantic 112.8 million tons... the total increase in world foodgrain consumption during this period was 148.5 million tons; the FSU demand collapse compensated for 76% of this..."

"The starvation conditions in Russian winters (and in other Former Soviet Union countries) and the resulting high mortality rates meant that the populations of these countries declined by 10.2 million between 1991 and 2002", @arindambn points out in his paper.

This graph, from the 2020 paper by @arindambn, shows the drastic collapse of per capita food grain consumption in the former Soviet Union countries following the destruction of the Soviet Union.
#Gorbachev

The paper by Arindam Banerjee quoted above is: "The 'Longer Food Crisis' and Consequences for Economic Theory and Policy in the South", published in the book 'Rethinking the Social Sciences with Sam Moyo' (eds. Praveen Jha, @parisyeros & Walter Chambati).
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