In short, the post-fall countries transitioned to Kleptocracies more than anything else. The transition to capitalism was very spotty and state run businesses existed for a long time after the fall (and in many cases many businesses are still state run and have yet to transition).
Out of the 200M+ [1] people in the USSR, what percentage would you say had connections to the party? My impression is that 99% (all but 2M) likely did not.
Hence, the "bad" parts did apply to plenty of people and those are the people we are talking about. My experience is from living half a decade in a post-fall country from 1995 to 2000. The people I talked to that missed communism often now had it bad and were left behind. In essence the average quality of life was worse under the USSR but the extremes in quality of life were less - nobody was fully left behind as they are now. There was a very certain social net that was there. On the flip side, with less extremes, there was very little opportunity for advancement, so you wind up with a relatively homogeneously poor but not impoverished society. Post-fall, poverty rates jumped (from extremely low to very high), the homogeneously poor society was still poor and the safety net was completely removed (without any of the upsides of non-communism yet to be felt; it's a decades long process to change an economy from the USSR system).
> unregulated capitalism
The only unregulated capitalism's out there are black markets. The capitalism of countries in transition post-fall were largely capitalism in name only. Kleptocracy is AFAIK far more accurate of how to describe those transitional governments that still exist today (Belorussia, Russia, Georgia, the central Asian republics are all examples that exist today)
> as well a huge amount of people fell victims to various Ponzi/pyramid/get-rich-quick schemes that were common in the west 100 years earlier but were new here
Is there somewhere I can read more about this? My impression is the governments switched to democracies in name only. Huge portions of government were there to siphon as much as they could for their own personal gain. Want a drivers license? Pay a bribe. Want a building permit? Pay ten bribes? Want to move your grain to a port terminal? Pay a bribe at every city you pass through. (The very latter is a real example, I was very loosely involved with a post-fall USDA project that looked at that problem. Notably identifying, "Hey, here is your problem - the bribes. By the time a farmer has gotten their grain to port they've payed more in bribes than their base cost - this will not work!"
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_of_former...
