HEALTH LIFESTYLES IN RUSSIA AND THE strongSOCIALISTstrong HERITAGE - MPIDR.pdf

HEALTH LIFESTYLES IN RUSSIA AND THE SOCIALIST HERITAGE William C. Cockerham, M. Christine Snead, and Derek F. DeWaal University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA For some historians, centuries are not precisely bounded by their round centennial dates; rather, their boundaries are defined by their long-term social, political, and cultural processes (Lukacs 1993). In this context, the momentous peacetime collapse of socialism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe between 1989-1991 can be said to mark the termination point of the twentieth century, even though there was almost another decade left to go. This event signaled the end of the world’s first socialist state and its demise as the great polarizing force of twentieth century global politics (Malia 1994). The collapse was so complete, described by some scholars as the structural equivalent of defeat in total war, “that Russia and the world, for the indefinite future, will be as engrossed with the consequences of the disaster as they once were with the vicissitudes of the experiment” (Malia 1994:2). One major consequence is the downturn in life expectancy that accompanied mature Soviet-style socialism. With the exception of East Germany, where the decline did not appear until very late in the 1980s, male longevity began to fall throughout the Soviet bloc in the mid-1960s (Bobak and Marmot 1996; Cockerham 1997, 1999, 2000a; Field 1995, 2000; Häussler, Hempel, and Reschke 1995; Jane Shkolnikov 1997; Tulchinsky and Varavikova 1996). Female life expectancy generally stagnated or advanced slightly compared to the West. The steepest decline was in Russia. As shown in Table 1, Russian male life expectancy stood at 64.0 years in 1965 but steadily decreased to 61.7 years by 1980. Male longevity improved during Gorbachev’s brief (1984-87) anti-alcohol campaign, reaching 64.9 years in 1987, and then entered a period of accelerated decline—centered around the fall of