Capitalism killed a million East Europeans

This video from Latvia says about itself:

Big disturbance in Riga, because of economical situation in Latvia. Nation wanted, that Latvian government to recede! And after peaceful demonstration, where was about 10-15 thousand people, started provocations and crowd (about 500-1000) wanted to occupy governmnet building.

See also here.

From British daily The Morning Star:

Turbo-capitalism killed a million, Lancet reports

(Thursday 15 January 2009)

THE Lancet medical journal published a report on Thursday which concluded that former socialist countries that rapidly sold off their state assets in the early 1990s triggered a sharp increase in male death rates.

The survey found that the “economic shock” of “rapid and massive” privatisation killed around a million people.

It focused on the death rate among men of working age in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union between 1989 and 2002 and defined “rapid, massive privatisation” as “the disposal of at least 25 per cent of large state-owned enterprises to the private sector within a two-year period.”

To avoid distortion, the investigators filtered out trade and price liberalisation, income change and historical levels of health.

Between 1991 and 1994, male death rates in Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, where Western-backed governments had imposed “shock therapy” privatisation, rose by 42 per cent, coinciding with a 305 per cent increase in unemployment.

Latvia rocked by protests: here; and here.