Sorry Robin, I really thought you were - must have remembered wrongly!

@Anixx - I am completely speechless by those graphs. I really would not have thought it was like that. I thought that the USSR was running poorly quite poorly during the last years, of its existance, and that perestroika was an attempt at fixing that, which went out of hand, so to speak. But these graphs at least, appear to show that problems started either at the start of glasnost, or in 1992. Either way, whatever came after looks grimmer, sort of "the cure is worse than the illness".

The Estonia / Latvia graphs must be partly down to migration of Russians. But not the one from Ukraine though, which was the more obvious one. The TB curve was terrible. I thought there was vaccination against that. And production. Surely producing *something* even if it is not the latest fashion/greatest quality, or whatever the problem with Soviet production was... must be better than just closing down the factories.

@Throbert, regarding Eastern European agriculture: Sure, you can do it a lot more efficiently than they did. But at the price of losing hundreds of thousands of jobs, in the case of the USSR. Perhaps they did not want that, or saw a strong need? After all, there WAS food for everyone - surely that is the ultimate goal of agriculture?

The agriculture/food industry you have in the USA is using GM crops, is ruthlessly exploiting third world farmers (which the USSR never did), while shamelessly subsidising your own farmers. It is creating a ridiculous superflux which means people are stuffing themselves with twice as much food as they need, and unhealthy food as that. It is making Americans fatter and unhealthier than any other industrial nation. I wouldn't hold up that type of system as an ideal.

Iit is not feasible for all countries to have this type of agriculture/food industry anyway. Only a small minority of countries can, since the exploiting nations need to have poorer, less successful countries to exploit... And keep them that way. If cheap imports stop, the system fails. And while I am pointing out the USA as the most extreme example of this, the same trend exists in Western Europe, although not quite as glaringly obvious.

The Eastern European system allowed them to keep people employed, doing something useful, feeding everybody and only importing foods that they genuinely could not grow themselves for climate reasons. I consider that as an achievement, even though technologically there was probably room for improvement.