I’ve seen some suggestions that the economic plunge in Russia and other formerly planned economies wasn’t as bad as the numbers say because statistics from the Communist era, when the economy may have been producing a lot of stuff nobody actually wanted, may have inflated the true level of output. But there’s plenty of other evidence for a collapse in living standards. Among other things, there was a plunge in life expectancy.

Bungled transition

Nor can we say that these short-run costs were an inevitable consequence of the transition from socialism to capitalism. As a 2001 International Monetary Fund paper pointed out, Russia’s performance after liberalisation was far worse than that of other “transition” economies.

So what went wrong? There were intense debates about that issue in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which as far as I can tell never reached a consensus; then everyone moved on to other issues. But there were a few plausible stories, not mutually exclusive. They include the following:

— At first, Russia only moved partially to a market economy, and the partial privatisation wasn’t systematic. The result was an awkward mix of government and private enterprise that was the worst of both worlds.

— Where it did privatise, Russia did so without the institutions — things like security regulation, rules against predatory behaviour and general rule of law — a market economy needs to function.

— Haphazard privatisation created a proliferation of monopolies, whose efforts to extract as much as possible from everyone else turned them into the modern equivalent of robber barons — the old barons, not Gilded Age industrialists — who hobbled commerce across the board.

‘Property is theft!’ declared anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; well, in Yeltsin’s Russia, much of it really was.

— Chaotic privatisation also created a class of oligarchs: men with vast, unearned wealth. “Property is theft!” declared anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; well, in Yeltsin’s Russia, much of it really was. And the power of the oligarchs surely distorted economic policy.

How much did each of these factors contribute to the post-Gorbachev economic disaster? I don’t know, and I suspect few, if any, other people do either. But Russia in the 1990s clearly offers a lesson in how not to transition to a market economy.

The problems of the 1990s culminated in a financial crisis in 1998. After that, the Russian economy finally stabilised and resumed growth; unfortunately, it did so under the leadership of a guy named Vladimir Putin. It’s doubtful whether economic recovery required the fall of democracy, but that’s how it worked out.

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This story may not be over. (Are such stories ever over?) I hope, of course, that Ukraine will defeat this invasion; if it does, one large part of the former Soviet Union may finally have achieved a durable democracy. And it’s possible to imagine a democratic Ukraine growing increasingly integrated with the European economy, showing a way to combine democracy with prosperity.

But that’s for the future. The sad historical truth is that Gorbachev’s political legacy was, to an important degree, poisoned by Russia’s economic failure.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.