Yeltsin’s government undertook economic reforms and neoliberal austerity measures that removed the Soviet-era social safety net and brought extreme economic hardship. Millions of Russians, men aged twenty-five to thirty-five in particular, died in the early 1990s from alcohol-related diseases, heart attacks, suicides, and homicides. The behaviors of elites who plundered the economy also expressed the collapse of values. Privatizations brought struggles among oligarchs for control of assets, and KGB officials smuggled vast sums of state gold and money out of Russia to offshore accounts. The
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