The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

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.

Seems like a lot of legwork to justify this, but it is an important idea none the less.