For those who lived in a communist country that then changed to capitalism, what was that transition like?

I was just pondering the idea of what it would look like if capitalism as an economic theory would fall in western countries and how that would affect places like the USA. This led me to realise that an economic transition on that scale has existed already for those who lived behind the iron curtain in Russia and European states.

I can accept the idea that "every one agrees to do a new thing" intellectually, but am finding it hard to comprehend what that would actually look like on all levels of an economy.