The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Back in the early 1990s, when the department of sociology was first established at Moscow State, its founders reached out to Western colleagues far from the liberal academic mainstream. One person they sought out was Allan Carlson, an American historian who taught at ultraconservative Hillsdale College in Michigan. Carlson was a follower of Pitirim Sorokin, one of the Russian thinkers exiled on the Philosophers' Ship in 1922. Sorokin went on to found the sociology department at Harvard. His prolific writings included doomsday warnings about the descent of Western civilization into decadence, and it was on these ideas that Carlson had based his own thinking. Carlson's books numbered half a dozen, all had the word "family" in the title, and each argued that the family was the bedrock of civilization and the sole key to the continued survival of humankind.¹²

Carlson visited Moscow State University in 1995, a year when the topic that dominated the social sciences—and much of the media— was Russia's demographic crisis. The country's population had been declining for half a century. People were having fewer children and dying earlier. Male life expectancy was among the lowest in Europe— by the early 1990s, it was in the mid-sixties—and it would stay at that level for a decade and a half.¹³ This meant that most adult Russian men living in the 1990s and 2000s would not live past age sixty-five.

American economist Nicholas Eberstadt has written extensively about Russian demographics. A chapter in his book on the Russian population crisis is titled "Russia's Ominous Patterns of Mortality and Morbidity: Pioneering New and Modern Pathways to Poor Health and Premature Death." He showed that no modern country had ever seen people die at the same rate in peacetime. According to 2006 figures, wrote Eberstadt, male life expectancy at age fifteen in Russian compared unfavorably with that in Ethiopia, Gambia, and Somalia. Two things appeared to be killing Russians

disproportionately: diseases of the cardiovascular system, and external causes, such as injuries and poisoning, including suicide.

Eberstadt scrutinized all the usual suspects: poor diet, smoking, lack of exercise, environmental pollution, economic shock and subsequent poverty, and, of course, vodka. But none of these factors explained enough of the problem, and even together they added up to barely half an explanation. True, Russians ate a fatty diet—but not as fatty as that of Western Europeans. Plus, Russians appeared to overeat less. Yes, Russia had taken abominable care of its environment, but it was seeing only a few more deaths from respiratory diseases than did Western Europe—and fewer deaths of diseases of the kidneys, which would be expected to result from pollution. Russians had lived through severe economic upheaval, but there was no indication that economic shock in a modern society leads quickly, or at all, to increased mortality—the Great Depression, for example, did not. Nor would a sudden drop in health-care services offer an explanation: Russia's health-care spending was roughly comparable to that of less-affluent Western European countries. Russians smoked a lot, but not as much as Greeks and Spaniards did while living on average as long as other Western Europeans. Russians did drink a lot, but not as much as Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians, whose life expectancy started improving soon after they broke off from the Soviet Bloc.¹⁴ Vodka and other alcohol played an important role in the high rates of cardiovascular, violent, and accidental deaths —but not a large enough role to explain the Russian demographic predicament. In fact, while vodka was the most popular explanation, it was also the most contradictory. Some studies actually showed that Russian drinkers lived longer than non-drinkers.¹⁵

Another scholar of Russian demographics, American anthropologist Michelle Parsons, suggested an explanation for the apparent vodka paradox: for what it is worth, alcohol may help people adapt to realities that otherwise make them want to curl up and die. Parsons, who called her book Dying Unneeded, argued that Russians were dying early because they had nothing and no one to live for. Eberstadt also ultimately concluded that the explanation had to do with mental health. He used longer-term statistics to demonstrate that what Russians were calling a "demographic crisis" had in fact been going on for decades—birthrates and life expectancy had been falling for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Only two periods stood out as exceptions to this trend: Khrushchev's Thaw and Gorbachev's perestroika, the brief spells when Russians anticipated a better future. The rest of the time, it seemed, Russians had been dying for lack of hope.