"The Dying Bear: Russia's Demographic Disaster"

Nicholas Eberstadt has written about this before, but the subject continues to astonish. 

UPDATE: link fixed now. Thanks. Art.

The overall magnitude of Russia’s downward health spiral is catastrophic. According to estimates from the Human Mortality Database, a research consortium, overall life expectancy at birth in Russia was slightly lower in 2009 (the latest year for which figures are available) than in 1961, almost half a century earlier. The situation is even worse for Russia’s adult population: in 2009, life expectancy at age 15 for all Russian adults was more than two years below its level in 1959; life expectancy for young men sank by almost four years over those two generations. Put another way, post-Soviet Russia has suªered a cumulative “excess mortality” of more than seven million deaths, meaning that if the country could have simply held on to its Gorbachev-era survival rates over the last two decades, seven million deaths could have been averted. This figure is more than three times the death toll World War I inflicted on imperial Russia.

Comments

[John S.]

Any chance the Kommissars may have been cooking the books during the Soviet era?

[david]

I really don't think those deaths would have been averted, delayed to a later time perhaps but not averted.

[Paul]

What goes unmentioned is the high rate of abortion. If you keep killing off the replacements, the population plummets.