The plague exerted a powerful influence on culture and religion with notions that the end of the world was near. Mass hysteria led to attacks on women, lepers and Jews who were scapegoated as the source of the plague. Many were burned at the stake. Science, the discovery that bubonic plague was spread by rats infested with fleas, answered the question of how to eradicate the disease.

We don’t have an outbreak of bubonic plague in Europe today, but we do have a forecast by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe that in the formerly socialist nations of eastern Europe the population will plunge a disastrous 20 percent between now and the year 2050. The population in that region will fall in absolute terms from 307 million to 250 million in the next 50 years. It will have a profoundly negative affect on the economic, political and social development of these countries. The population will quickly age and a shrunken work force will struggle to generate economic growth.

While Russia’s population is projected to decline 18 percent, Hungary is expected to shrink 25 percent, Bulgaria and Latvia both 31 percent and Estonia, 34 percent. It is a combination of a plummeting birth rate and an equally precipitous decline in life expectancy. Russia’s life expectancy fell to a low of 64.1 years in 1994 and has marginally improved since then. There is a differential between men, with a life expectancy of only 57.4 years and women, 71 years. Alcoholism and cigarette addiction are major factors. Diseases like TB, pandemic in Russia before the revolution, have come roaring back along with diphtheria and even cholera.

But there are other visible symptoms of this public health crisis such as soaring hunger and homelessness. Beggars, many of them senior citizens, are now a common sight on Moscow streets. Prostitution has surged. Crime, drug addiction, suicide, AIDS, all these pathologies have surged since the counterrevolution.

The U.N. report confirms that the advanced capitalist powers also have declining birthrates. They are recruiting skilled workers, scientists, engineers, and other intellectuals from the formerly socialist countries at bargain basement prices, a "brain drain" that will further retard economic development in eastern Europe. Millions of impoverished east Europeans are migrating west in hopes of escaping poverty. These countries are being pushed into neo-colonial servitude.

The catastrophic vital statistics that have engulfed eastern Europe since the counterrevolution offers paradoxical proof that socialism was a living system capable of providing a secure and happy life for its citizens. Cold War anti-Communists argued that socialism was an "accident of history," a "detour" from monopoly capitalism which they invariably equate with "democracy."

If capitalism was a case of restoring the "natural order" then how do the Cold Warriors explain these disastrous vital statistics? Capitalism has produced only misery, a declining living standard, a growing gap between a majority poor and a tiny obscenely rich elite. And now, we have chilling evidence that a modern day plague, a spiritual death, is shrinking the populations of these countries.

During a two-week visit to eastern Germany in 1995, five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I interviewed many women who described in detail the disaster that befell them with the betrayal of socialism. Many were in open despair. For others, the grief had turned to anger.

They had enjoyed all the benefits of socialism: full employment, low cost housing, free medical care, generous paid maternity leave, child care, often at their places of employment, and a superb public education system.

The GDR provided a rich cultural and recreational life for its citizens. Many of these women held positions of leadership in the German Democratic Republic. They told me that the overwhelming majority of GDR citizens supported socialism. It even included the "dissidents" most of whom wanted an "improved" or "more democratic" socialism.

Eastern Europe is not the only place on earth with alarming vital statistics. HIV/AIDS is decimating the population of the African continent like the fifth horseman of the apocalypse. If transnational capitalism has no answers for the peoples of eastern Europe, it has less to offer the peoples of Africa.

The new capitalist elite of eastern Europe views the declining birthrate as a calamity. And they are opting for repressive methods to increase it: strip women of their reproductive rights, outlaw birth control and abortion rights. They are taking their lead from Afghanistan’s feudal, woman-hating Taliban.

Capitalism is not the only alternative. Socialism, a system that values human life above private profits, is within our reach. For the sake of future generations we should seize that alternative. Human life is in the balance.

Tim Wheeler is the editor of the People’s Weekly World.