Gessen’s investigation into the high mortality rates in Russia represents a symbolic struggle for truth which may be beyond the grasp of social or physical sciences. Gessen clearly uses ‘empirically’ valid approaches to solve this underlying question, to find the greater answer to the stories of individual events she had been writing about for years. First is Parson’s extensive set of interviews that aim to get past the public mask and to the private one, which, as she points out, is inherently flawed as the subjects are naturally the survivors, not the victims. Beyond this, even if Parson was hypothetically able to interview victims, a person outside this private mask will never know if the subjects account actually represents the private mask or is simply a false layer of the public one. Second is Eberstadt’s in depth approach of a range of demographics. This clearly points to another issue; again, these are simply observations and numbers, upon which an analytical framework based in hindsight is used to find causation. But the “why?” in social science cannot be based on general statistics, as the field is innately made up of individuals with personal private masks and (perhaps) differing motivations for action. Thus, any cultural, institutional or historic methodology to understand the grand truth, by definition, approaches it asymptotically, serving only as the most current and closest estimation of what is actually occurring.