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
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