I think there is something genuinely morbidly curious in how socialists like to talk about "social murder" and it is an incredibly important part of their ideology, while ML societies were genuinely a negative example of all of this in a really puzzling way and they have zero interest in it.

Eastern and Central Europe at the peak of socialist power and ideology in the 1960s to 1990s lived through a universal increase in adult mortality and morbidity in the average case, or at best started to rapidly accumulate the lag, like the GDR. The thing that made it genuinely weird by any historical standards was that all of this was happening against the background of economic growth and increasing economic equality, which are the normal explanations for disparities and underperformance.

Socialists are just genuinely uninterested in this to a radical degree because:

1) for them, it all starts in the 1990s and you do not need to explain anything that was happening before because the 1990s have happened.

2) One can talk about how it was quite good in the 1960s and would be Africa if not for socialism. It is obviously bizarre because the poorest underdeveloped non-socialist Europeans like Spain and Portugal closed the gap and now have above average life expectancy in Europe.

If you try to speak to people about it, if they at least recognize it, it converges into a literal schizophrenia about the paramount importance of consumer choices under socialism, enjoying life, and colorful packaging on tobacco instead of photos of cancer.

Obviously, it is incredibly hard to treat it well. Not recognizing it demands genuine resistance to even temporal within-country trends. Recognizing it while still performing the usual rhetorical bits afterward looks even more absurd. But it is a baseline position in the movement. It is like if the right liberals were going around explaining how their economic preferences lead to far more equality, and that this was one of their main selling points.

Bizarrely, the examples of countries who not only suffered a decline in the 90s but also ended on a permanently worse trajectory after are probably Georgians and Armenians as far as I got in my research but everyone talks about Russians who were having 30 years of decline since 60s or Central Europeans who had a moderate decline after decades of stagnation and a rapid increase after.