Nicholas Eberstadt looks to avoid the usual biases and pitfalls facing most interpretations of the “Dying Russian” situation. He’s willing to look beyond the general theories that dominate the argument, expand the historical scope of his study and avoid the temptation of coming up with an answer to the problem. He compares what seem to be statistical abnormalities in Russian mortality, such as heart disease, to other countries. He shows the normal culprits, high calorie consumption and drinking, are not what’s causing Russian heart disease, as similar conditions exist in other western countries and they have lower deaths related to heart disease. He looks at Russian population growth over the course of the 20^th century, and shows high mortality isn’t just a 1990s problem. Previous studies have made conclusions on their limited scope and misinterpretation. His dedication allows him to shatter myth after myth surrounding the Russian mortality problem. His comprehensive study is able to deliver a very precise analysis, but no answers. Which brings into question, if precise methods prove we have no answers and imprecise methods give us answers, can we really hope to understand our world?

In Gessen’s “The Dying Russians” two methods for uncovering the truth have been shown. One, by Michelle Parsons, attempts to uncover why Russians are dying so young by focusing on one turning point. The other, by Eberstadt, attempts to do the same by analyzing many smaller factors. Despite their different perspectives, neither manages to determine what is actually causing the poor demographic situation in Russia. The former is a cut-and-dry case as it only points to one change, the fall of communism, to explain the situation in Russia. This falls under the definition of a “hedgehog” according to Berlin. However, Eberstadt is not so clear. While at first glance his argument appears to be that of a fox—analyzing many different elements—they are all of the same scientific nature. In my opinion, this defeats the purpose of a foxy argument (to cover all potential angles). Therefore, neither Eberstadt nor Parsons seem to analyze the situation effectively. Instead of treating cultural, institutional, and historical elements as being interconnected, as they should, they analyze them in independent vacuums. Treating these factors as parts of a whole would put us on the path towards finding the truth behind Russia’s “crisis.” In the end, we can’t find an overall truth. However, we can still find many other smaller truths that lead up to it. By putting these smaller truths together (for example, by acknowledging that both Eberstadt and Parsons’ arguments have elements of truth to them), we can get closer and closer to this greater truth. Although we can never fully grasp what this fully means (like infinity to mathematicians), it does not mean that it is not worth striving for. If it isn’t worth striving for, then we may as well give up on everything now, because by that logic anything less than perfection is worth nothing at all.

Masha Gessen’s piece, “The Dying Russians” illustrates the ways in which a mix of both qualitative and quantitative data can provide us a more complete picture of the problem. We tend to give our blind faith to numbers. Statistics such as the 30% of deaths from heart disease are harrowing, but it doesn’t explain the causation. Gessen explores the different, more physiological explanations for this statistic, but ultimately makes the point that numbers cannot tell us the full story, as comparative approaches with other countries’ death statistics simply do not add up. In this scenario, Ian Shapiro’s concept of problem-oriented research is well highlighted. Ultimately, it is the cultural, institution, and historical instruments of explanation that allow us to grasp a sense of why the Russians are dying at such alarming rates. Gessen mentions that one woman says that “the difference between current poverty and poverty in the postwar era is that ‘now there are rich folks'”. These personal accounts are paradoxically specific and representative of the Russian experience and the lack of hope that has resulted due to their tragic historical plight. In a way, it seems that we can approach a “truth”, but this “truth” does not lie beyond the grasp of social science. Social science is about attempting to harmonize the qualitative and the quantitative. Gessen’s piece attempts to explain a puzzle and offers us an elegant and poetic explanation. It is not clear to me that such an explanation is objectively less verifiable or valid than a traditional scientific one. Her piece attempts to encompass a population-wide sentiment that not even the Russians can fully understand. Any effort to confront a question of this magnitude with such care is helpful and leads us in the right direction.

Masha Gessen’s “The Dying Russians” is an interesting article that demonstrates the interdisciplinary quality of political science. On one hand, hard data is vital in creating any theory. The article cites the evidence of low birth rates and high death rates in Russia over the last century, specifically the modern fertility rate of 1.61 and the 27 million people lost between 1941 and 1946. While the death rate might have seemed to correlate with a lack of economic progress in the era following the demise of the USSR, it has continued to increase through the present, despite the surge of capitalism and relative economic success. In order to make sense of these patterns, one must venture into the humanities to try to find causality. It is not enough to simply site the relationship between heavy drinking and the staggering amount of cardiovascular disease. One must try to decipher the Russian population’s desire to drink so heavily. Gessen mentions both mental illness and the lack of “hope” among people. Aside from possible statics of mental illness, this causality between hope and death cannot adequately be described by hard science. It involves exploring the private transcript of the population that cannot be assessed accurately using state propaganda or the birth and death rate statistics, essentially the public transcript of modern Russia. Further, these trends will undoubtedly continue if they remained unquestioned by the people. If such widespread death is half-heartedly accepted, there will remain no impetus for change on a national scale. Overall, this issue can only be understood through a mixture of the hard sciences and humanities.

In her article, “The Dying Russians,” Masha Gessen juxtaposes the research techniques of two professionals eager to identify the source of the heightened death rate in Russia. As others have said, and as I concur, this piece aligns nicely with Ziblatt’s article on the Middle Range Theory. Parsons represents what Zilbatt refers to as a hedgehog, as she was on the quest “for a single grand synthesis of politics,” in her goal to explore the cultural context of the Russian mortality crisis. Her scope of study manages to be simultaneously too broad and too narrow. To study the “cultural context” as a whole is both unrealistic and almost unachievable given Parson’s limited cultural context. She lives in the very context that she attempts to study, and because of this, she is blind to certain truths about Russian culture. Gessen makes this clear when she writes, “Parsons and her subjects, whom she quotes at length, seem to have an acute understanding of the first two forces shaping Soviet society but are almost completely blind to the last.” Conversely, Nicholas Eberstadt works inductively which allows him to identify the more gradual changes that have been underway well before 1991. Though his methodology is more fox-like, and thus (as said by Ziblatt) becomes superior, I think that he is missing a key part of study. A lot of students have expressed a distrust in Parsons interviewing of Russian middle-aged citizens, I think that it adds a crucial element to this investigation. You cannot come to a conclusion about a culture without what Geertz describes as a “thick description.” And in order to gain a thick description one has to immerse themselves in that culture, and realize their own bias as an analysis. I feel that Eberstadt does not do enough to immerse himself in this culture, and seems to miss key interactions with the very people who live in this context. But in conclusion, I would say that it is hard to know if there is a truth that lies beyond the grasp of social or even medical science. I say this because it is hard to prove something to the point where it can never be disproven, and it is easy to say that something is law and have it later uncovered. This does not meant that we should stop trying, because I think that parts of the objective truth are being uncovered everyday.

Masha Gessen’s article, The Dying Russians, brings me back to our class discussion from last week on Middle Range Theory politics. More specifically, the distinguish between inductive and deductive reasoning theorists use to formulate their political and other such theories. Its relative metaphor to understand this paradigm of logic is used in the example of the hedgehog and the fox. Whereas the hedgehog claims to know one thing very well, the fox claims to be privy to many. The two theorists in this article, Michelle Parsons and Nicholas Eberstadt, embody two different methods of study. Parsons utilizes deductive reasoning and is the hedgehog, while Eberstadt informs the reader using inductive reasoning which corresponds to being the fox. Parson’s analysis of the mortality trend hones in on the 1990s, and without much hard statistical evidence to support, relies off of the testimonies of middle-aged Russians to purport the claim that similar cultural trends that occurred after WWII fed into the 90s crisis. Moreover, the scope of her study was very limited. Although she was determined to explain the defining moment that triggered this mortality crisis, she skimmed over the Gorbachev period which was flanked by economic failure and social movements. Conversely, Eberstadt is hesitant to qualify such observations into a theory, but instead looks at the mortality crisis from a decades long perspective. And unlike Parsons, Eberstadt does not prioritize one reason or the other, but broadens his scope to conduct multiple different studies to garner statistics to further inform him. His inductive reasoning has given him plenty of data, but has left him baffled as to properly pin the crisis on one thing. His role as the fox has led him to examine the problem in a more holistic and less partisan to one viewpoint not only because he has expanded the timeframe of the crisis, but also because he doesn’t believe that middle-aged, average “Muscovites” encumber the entirety of the problem.

The process by which we define “science” can be loosely twisted and given certain connotations depending on the person deciding its meaning. In “The Dying Russians,” by Masha Geesen, Political Science is abled to be described from a point of science. Often people doubt the accuracy and legitimacy of political science being an actual science, but Masha’s examples of studies and researchers lean otherwise.
One study done by Nicholas Eberstadt was a full emersion into the findings, causes, and effects he was looking for. His intense and extensive study looking at very minuscule details shows the effectiveness of looking at political science as a science. Despite certain trail errors, it was still a very successful study. In experiments involved in the hard sciences, there are still margins of error and theories just as there are in the study of political science, proving that these studies are reliable and true. While the question of reason for why the deaths of so many Russians is still up in the air, the question of whether or not a study of political science can be defined as a “science” is answered.

While Masha Gessen makes a well-informed attempt at diagnosing Russia’s high mortality rate, drawing from the research of Michelle Parson and Nicholas Eberstadt, the analysis and conclusion leave a lot to be desired. When summarizing Eberstadt’s data and analyzing it herself, she uses a plethora of other countries to excuse the Russian rates of the given lifestyle characteristic. Their diet is not as fatty as the Western Europeans. They don’t smoke as much as the Greeks and Spaniards. They don’t drink as much as much as the Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians. But if the Western Europeans have the fatties diet and Russians are second to that, if the Greeks and Spaniards are the heaviest smokers and Russians are right behind them, and if the Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians are the heaviest drinking followed closely behind by the Russians, the combination of diet, smoking, and drinking would be high enough to explain a higher than expected death rate. Just because Russians are not #1 at any given unhealthy activity does not mean that that specific activity has no correlation to the high death rate. The methods and analysis of this data need considerably more credibility if they aim to explain why so many Russians are dying.

In class, we have repetitively come across the idea that the state can pressure you to conform and can control your body, but the state never has access to what is in your heart and mind unless you act on those thoughts/feelings. The only way for social scientists to gain access to this internal space is through a “thick description”, and while Parson attempted that in her thorough analysis, she was analyzing the wrong group of people, the survivors that are way older than the current youth population in Russia. While Gessen acknowledges this handicap, that does little to make it more credible. Perhaps “a series of long unstructured interviews with average Muscovites”, if the right group was interviewed, would be sufficient to diagnose death by broken heart, but the empirical scientist in me begs for more concrete evidence. While Eberstadt presents this in his analysis, as I wrote earlier, simply saying the Russians don’t eat as badly as this group, don’t smoke as much as another group, and don’t drink as much as that group over there, is not sufficient to rule out those causes in death.

Finally, even if this diagnosis is rock solid, what is the best course of treatment?

I think there is some value to the idea of a truth beyond any form of science because the scope of any discipline is necessarily incomplete. An anthropological approach will give insight into the human effects of social change but is limited by the number of people it can reach; a historical analysis will net valuable data on societal trends while neglecting the personal impact of those trends in every way but outcomes. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t see the truth. A blended approach, one combining a macro understanding of trends with an eye for the human detail, can move closer to the truth than any single method alone.

This type of synthesis is attempted by Masha Gessen in “The Dying Russians”. He examines the work of both an anthropologist and an economist to try to understand why Russians are dying so young after the fall of the Soviet Union. Parsons, the anthropologist, provides a compelling answer: they feel unneeded. The transition from Soviet-communism to capitalism and the plunder of the Soviet coffers by western businesspeople rapidly shifted the views of the average Russian towards their job – they went from feeling needed and secure to superfluous and exploited. Their early deaths are a product of their alienation. This explanation is persuasive in context, but, as Gessen notes, fails to account for the previously high rates of death in Russia. According to Eberstadt’s statistical analysis, Soviet mortality rates spiked in multiple periods before the fall of the Berlin wall. These increases cannot be explained by a feeling of uselessness after the implementation of robber-capitalism. Instead, Gessen suggests, they’re a product of hopelessness. The Soviet system ground down Russians, who started to perish from despair; this was not stopped by a transition to capitalism, and indeed increased. The feelings of Parsons’s Russian subjects are not wrong, but are poorly contextualized. With a combined approach, a shrewd examiner can mesh the experiences of people with their historical frame to better understand a society and its outcomes.