section: Other "great depressions"
question: What is another name for an economic downturn?
article: Great Depression
candidates: Other economic downturns have been called a "great depression", but none had been as widespread, or lasted for so long. Various nations have experienced brief or extended periods of economic downturns, which were referred to as "depressions", but none have had such a widespread global impact. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the breakdown of economic ties which followed, led to a severe economic crisis and catastrophic fall in the standards of living in the 1990s in post-Soviet states and the former Eastern Bloc, which was even worse than the Great Depression. Even before Russia's financial crisis of 1998, Russia's GDP was half of what it had been in the early 1990s, and some populations are still poorer than they were in 1989, including Ukraine, Moldova, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.