Did privatisation increase the Russian death rate?

On 15 January 2009, the article, Did Privatization Increase the Russian Death Rate? by R.M. Schneiderman, appeared in The New York Times' Business section. 

Schneiderman asnwered his own question thus:

"That’s what a new study published online today in The Lancet, an independent medical journal, says. The authors of the study write that THE RAPID AND WIDESPREAD PRIVATIZATION OF STATE INDUSTRIES IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION AND EASTERN BLOC COUNTRIES DURING THE EARLY 1990S INCREASED THE DEATH RATE 13 PERCENT...

As communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the former Eastern bloc countries saw dire health consequences: MORE THAN THREE MILLION PEOPLE DIED PREMATURELY, according to the United Nations...

As the former Eastern bloc countries began making the transition from communism to capitalism... some (economists) advocated 'SHOCK THERAPY,' a term that denotes an immediate and rapid transition to capitalism...

JEFFREY SACHS, the director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, A LEADING ADVOCATE OF THE 'SHOCK THERAPY' SCHOOL OF THOUGHT, SERVED AS AN ECONOMIC ADVISER TO A NUMBER OF THE EASTERN BLOC COUNTRIES, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Russia."

'Shock' therapist, Jeffrey Sachs, is Jewish. As are most of the ‘Oligarchs’ who plundered the wealth of the ordinary people and profited so obscenely from Russia's particularly nasty variation on the privatisation scam. A good few of these Oligarchs are now living in London. Check out Boris Berezovsky

Anyway, that's what Privatisation did for the ordinary Soviet citizen. The Tory and New Labour versions of the great privatisation rip off didn't do much for the least well off over here either.