ABSTRACT: In the 1990s, some 400 million people across Eastern Europe lived through an economic collapse deeper than the Great Depression. Yet, while families lost jobs, pensions, and even years of life expectancy, Western institutions and commentators insisted things were "getting better." This article calls that denial what it was: collective gaslighting. By massaging statistics, celebrating televisions and cars, and blaming cultural "deficiencies," experts erased the trauma of entire societies. Revisiting the transition through the eyes of those who endured it reveals not a triumphant march to democracy but a politics of memory and denial whose consequences still shape Western society today.
Kristen R. Ghodsee (Sun,) studied this question.