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While I do somewhat agree with your statement about looking at individual states and how they performed, the total results also need to be taken into consideration as we are talking about Eastern Europe as a whole here, and considering western neoliberals promised unprecedented levels of growth through shock therapy to the entire region, why not look at how it still hasnt recovered from capitalism's impacts.

Its a really stupid argument, often attributed to how many people "communism killed" this thing youre saying about birthrates. I would have expected you to know, but it is no surprise that as countries develop, it is only natural that their birthrate decrease as opposed to when they were less developed, which Tsarist Russia very much was. The simple reason for this is that when a country is less developed, families need more sources of income, but more mouths to feed also appear, so they are at a constant of poverty. 

This was seen with London and other western European countries in the mid 1800s, where families had upwards of 4-5 children which after growing up to around 8 years old acted as a source of income due to child labour, and considering that before the October Revolution, Tsarist Russia was the most backwards state in Europe, we can attribute the 1800s qualities to it as well. It is also foolish to not consider this argument when looking at the USSR and how its birthrates decreased as the country got more developed and eventually rose to superpower status, threatening the capitalist world order. We also need to take into consideration that massive damages in human life that occurred due to the German invasion in 1941.
Nevertheless, where I was getting with my argument about population was that capitalism has left that country in shambles so much, the citizens feel the need to emigrate to the west where they are actually paid a significant amount more than in their own country, nowhere is this more obvious than in the Balkans where people are fleeing to Germany, Britain or France, where the minimum they would be paid would be 1000 euros, which is often 5 times more than what they were getting paid back home.
michelangelodavid — Today at 2:04 PM
Regarding corruption, while the late Soviet bureaucratization and the introduction of capitalist elements into the economy created conditions that contributed (party officials having administrative control, networks of influence, etc.), the massive corruption explosion came primarily from the process of capitalist restoration itself. The "shock therapy" privatization was essentially legalized theft, state assets were sold at fraction of their value, workers were forced to sell shares for basic survival, Western "advisors" helped orchestrate the plunder, Foreign capital swooped in for bargains, and not to mention that many of the oligarchs werent "corrupt party officials" but rather criminal organization leaders, economic advisors or new entrepreneurs.

The scale of corruption post-1991 far exceeded anything in the late Soviet period. This was capitalism being born "dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt" as Marx described. Blaming it all on the Soviet system serves to hide the role of Western capital and the inherent violence of capitalist restoration. The corruption wasnt inherited - it was integral to the process of creating capitalism itself. The transformation from bureaucratic privilege to capitalist ownership required the destruction of the planned economy. Many former officials became capitalists not because they had accumulated vast wealth, but because privatization gave them the opportunity to seize state assets. This explains why even "clean" officials participated in the post-Soviet plunder - it wasnt about prior corruption, but about the new opportunity to convert administrative control into private ownership during capitalist restoration.
michelangelodavid — Today at 2:14 PM
While the Russian oligarchy represented a peculiar hybrid - not quite a "proper" capitalist class, especially in the 1990s, as time passed and regimes changed they came to resemble the common capitalist class that we are familiar with. The prior were economic warlords and parasites which engaged in violent competition, lacked cohesive class consciousness, operated through semi-criminal networks, dependent on personal political connections and focused on asset stripping, however under Putin's regime they were forced to change into a traditional interpretation of a capitalist class, accepting state oversight, following formal legal procedure, reinvesting and acting with more class discipline.  This transformation from "wild" oligarchy to more regulated capitalism shows how the 1990s oligarchs werent yet a fully formed capitalist class, but rather represented a transitional form during primitive accumulation, similar to how the capitalist class we are used to developed in Western Europe as well, but under different circumstances 
michelangelodavid — Today at 2:24 PM
I see it as ignorance from capitalists who are hellbent of getting rid of their enemy that poses a risk to the 10% and their wealth. When looking at how communist theory was applied, in many places, it was altered due to the materialistic and social conditions of the society that lived there. While I do despise the argument as it drives people away from constructive criticism and lesson learning which could be helpful in the next time it is tried, what youre saying about capitalists not using the "not real capitalism" argument is also wrong, as there are many liberals and free-market advocated which when presented with failures and problems of capitalism, bring up the "not real capitalism" argument and instead call it mixed economy, corporatism, state capitalism or many of the other "get out of jail free card" they can come up with