Gross domestic product per capita is less than one third the EU's. Infrastructure, internal and export markets, state institutions - all crumbled with dizzying speed.
In some countries - not the least Russia - privatization amounted to a mass transfer of assets to cronies and insiders, often well-connected members of the communist nomenclature: managers, members of the security services and other penumbral figures. Laws were passed and institutions tweaked to reflect the special interests of these groupings. "Classical" forms of crime flourished throughout the benighted region. Prostitution, gambling, drugs, smuggling, kidnapping, organ trafficking and other varieties of delinquency yielded to their perpetrators billions of dollars annually. In the impoverished economies of the east, these fantastic revenues - laundered through off shore accounts - were leveraged by criminals to garner political favors, to buy into legitimate businesses and to infiltrate civil society.
None of this is new to Western publics. Rogues and "robber barons" have always doubled as entrepreneurs.
The oil, gaming and railways industries in America, for instance, owe their existence to dubious personas and questionable practices. Well into the 17th century, the British sovereign maintained a monopoly on chartering businesses and awarded the coveted licenses to loyal servants and obsequious sycophants.
Still, the ubiquity of crime in east Europe and its reach are unprecedented in European annals. In the void-like interregnum between centrally planned and free market economies only criminals, politicians, managers, and employees of the security services were positioned to benefit from the upheaval.
At the outset of transition, the underworld constituted an embryonic private sector, replete with international networks of contacts, cross-border experience, capital agglomeration and wealth formation, sources of venture (risk) capital, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a diversified portfolio of investments and revenue generating assets.
Criminals were used to private sector practices: price signals, competition, joint venturing, and third party dispute settlement.
Crime - alone among all economic activities in communist societies - obeyed the laws of the free market. Criminals had to be entrepreneurial and profitable to survive. Their instincts sharpened by - often lethal - competition, they were never corrupted by central planning.
Deprived of access to state largesse, criminals invested their own capital in efficiently-run small to medium size enterprises. Attuned to the needs and wishes of their customers, criminals engaged in primitive forms of market research, through neighborhood and grassroots "pollsters" and "activists". They responded with agility and in real time to changes in the patterns of supply and demand by altering their product mix and their pricing.
They have always been pioneers of bleeding-edge technologies.