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IJE Advance Access originally published online on December 4, 2006
International Journal of Epidemiology 2006 35(6):1406-1409; doi:10.1093/ije/dyl242
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2006; all rights reserved.

Commentary

Commentary: N Eberstadt's ‘The health crisis in the USSR’ and sustainable mortality reversal in the post-Soviet space during communism and after

Vladimir M Shkolnikov1,* and David A Leon2

1 Max Planck Insitute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Str., 1 D-18057 Rostock, Germany.
2 London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London WC1E 7HT, UK.

* Corresponding author. E-mail: Shkolnikov@demogr.mpg.de

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

In 1965 life expectancy in the USSR began to decrease. Initially this was regarded as a minor and transient fluctuation of little significance. However, by the mid-1970s both scholars and the Soviet authorities alike realized that the unfavourable trend was real and could last longer. In 1974 the Soviet government started to restrict the mortality data that was released, such that by 1976 publication of these data in the public domain ceased entirely. This was justified as being politically desirable given the ongoing ideological struggle with ‘imperialism’. These developments came under intense scrutiny by Nick Eberstadt in his article ‘Health Crisis in the USSR’, published in The New York Review in February 1981.1 The article was based on a few earlier studies evaluating mortality levels and trends in the Soviet Union over the 1950–70s from fragmentary statistical data.2–5 The most important of these—Christopher Davis and Murray Feshbach's book ‘Rising Infant . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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