ABSTRACT
The Soviet Union was formed in 1922, in the aftermath of World War I, and was formally dissolved in 1991, a period of sixty-nine years of Communist domination of Eastern and Central Europe. "Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Russian and Ukrainian households have experienced periods of economic marginalization." The early years of the transition were also marked by a severe economic depression in Russia and neighboring states, a Depression whose effect on Gross Domestic Product was far worse than the effect of the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s. Sixty-one percent of the respondents in one survey in Ukraine said that their main job or pension did not allow them to purchase all that their household needed. Clearly, the large majority of citizens in the former Soviet Union have survived the transition and have had two decades to adjust to the new routines of ordinary life.
