The Post-Communist Mood

Liberation was supposed to feel good. When the Berlin Wall came down and one-party states dissolved across Central and Eastern Europe, the expectation was that newly free citizens would report happier, more satisfied lives. Instead, the European Values Study caught the opposite. Through the 1990s, as command economies unravelled into inflation, unemployment and institutional chaos, life satisfaction across the post-communist world dipped — bottoming out near the end of the decade, below where it had been under late communism.

Then it turned. From a trough in 1999, the post-communist average climbed steadily across the next two waves, and by 2017 the gap to Western Europe had roughly halved. The story of Eastern European well-being since the wall fell is not a straight line up. It is a V — a dip, then a long, broad-based recovery — set against a West that barely moved. As we will see, the dip itself was shallower than the headline bloc average implies, once you follow the same countries through.

Two things make the V legible — but the first, its depth, demands care. In 1990, the post-communist nations averaged 6.11 on the 1-to-10 satisfaction scale while the West sat at 7.48 — a gap of 1.37 points. Averaged across all surveyed post-communist countries, the bloc then dropped to 5.70 by 1999. Most of that plunge, though, is not existing countries falling: it is new, low-scoring countries entering the panel. Russia (4.74), Ukraine (4.56) and Belarus (4.81) — among the lowest national readings anywhere in the European record — were all surveyed for the first time in 1999, dragging the average down without any country having moved. Hold the country set fixed — the same 10 post-communist nations measured in both waves — and the genuine within-country dip from 1990 to 1999 is only 0.19 of a point (to 5.92), against the 0.41 drop on the shifting set. The real collapse was shallower than the bloc line first suggests; the deep trough is largely a composition effect.

The second is the recovery's breadth. This was not one or two showcase economies pulling up an average. Across the fixed set of nations measured in both 1990 and 2017, every post-communist country rose, and the steepest climbers were the ones that had started lowest. Romania gained the most — up 1.62 points, from 5.88 to 7.50. Slovenia rose 1.38, Estonia 1.23, Latvia 1.21, Bulgaria 1.17. The West, meanwhile, drifted: Sweden actually slipped 0.33 of a point, and Italy was essentially flat.

Catch-up, made precise

Convergence has a fingerprint. Plot where each nation began against how much it changed, and if the laggards are gaining on the leaders the cloud of points slopes downhill: low starters, top-left, post big gains; high starters, lower-right, barely move or fall. That is exactly the pattern Eastern Europe traces.

The whole distribution tightened as a result. The standard deviation of national life-satisfaction averages across Europe — a plain measure of how spread apart the countries are — fell from 0.84 in 1990 to 0.53 in 2017. Europe in 2017 was a more uniformly satisfied continent than the one that emerged blinking from the Cold War. The East still trails, by about 0.65 of a point, but the chasm of the 1990s has closed to a step.

What recovered alongside satisfaction

Why did the mood lift? The EVS can't settle causation, but it carries a clue worth taking seriously. Alongside the question about life satisfaction, the survey asks people how much freedom of choice and control they feel they have over the way their lives turn out — a sense of personal agency. In the post-communist world, that perceived freedom moved on almost the same timetable as well-being: dipping through the disorienting 1990s, then rising firmly. The Eastern bloc's felt freedom climbed from 6.35 in 1990 to 7.08 in 2017, a gain of 0.73 of a point.

The pairing fits a long-running argument in well-being research: that a rising sense of free choice is among the most proximate engines of rising happiness, and that the effect is sharpest precisely in the transition economies, where freedom expanded fastest from a low base (Inglehart, Foa, Peterson & Welzel, 2008). The EVS data here are consistent with that — two evaluative judgments, satisfaction and felt agency, recovering in step. They cannot prove that one drove the other. But the East did not simply grow richer into contentment; it grew freer-feeling at the same time.

What this does, and does not, show

An unbalanced panel. The EVS visited different countries in different waves. The bloc averages here include every country with an adequate sample in a given wave, so the number of countries shifts from one point to the next; the catch-up scatter and the named risers use only the fixed set of nations present in both 1990 and 2017. Early waves are thin in the East — the post-communist line begins in 1990 because few of these countries were surveyable before the wall fell.

Nations, not people. For every cross-country and bloc figure each country counts once, regardless of population. This is the average national experience converging, not a population-weighted European average — a small Baltic state and Russia move the bloc line equally. Within each country, estimates use the EVS survey weight.

Association, not proof. Satisfaction and perceived freedom recovered together; that is a correlation across waves, not evidence that one caused the other. Income, institutions, EU accession and simple time all moved alongside them.

Evaluative only. Both measures are reflective judgments — how satisfied you are with your life, how much control you feel you have. The EVS carries no daily-mood or "yesterday" affect items, so nothing here speaks to how people's days actually felt. The story stays evaluative throughout.