East Germany was an exception because they were reunited with a wealthy Western partner that could absorb the shock, and this was done specifically to create people like you who would think the end of the USSR was a good thing. The rest of the former Soviet bloc didn’t have anything like that, and so life expectancy fell and death rates rose. It took over a decade to recover, and even today they still lag behind the rest of Europe.
East Germany was an exception because they were reunited with a wealthy Western partner that could absorb the shock, and this was done specifically to create people like you who would think the end of the USSR was a good thing. The rest of the former Soviet bloc didn’t have anything like that, and so life expectancy fell and death rates rose. It took over a decade to recover, and even today they still lag behind the rest of Europe.