The intersection of political science, history, and journalism in Masha Gessen’s study of the decades long rise in Russian mortality demonstrates how vital it is to be on the right side of the Isaiah Berlin Hedgehog/Fox paradigm. On one level, the interdisciplinary approach to the question ensures that each individual finding can be aggregated into a picture of the truth clearer than each approach would approach alone. On another, the importance of recognizing the intersections of culture, institutions, and history in affecting something as broad as mortality is that each approach can reveal ways in which the others are incomplete. The cultural malaise that can keep birth rates low and contribute to a whole host of behaviors that in themselves don’t explain historically high death rates but together fit tellingly into a larger canvas cannot be understood without understanding the Soviet and post-Soviet institutions that shape (and are shaped by) that culture, which in turn cannot be understood without knowledge of the history of the post-Stalinist USSR and the factors that contributed to its disintegration and the state formation/recalibration of the Russian Federation. Even when all of these things are put together, there is no certain answer as to why Russians keep dying younger than much of the world, but an approach that is secure in the fact that it is more important to get closer to an uncertain truth than to project confidence behind a grand theory that doesn’t correspond to reality is an approach that will produce valuable analysis.