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?
When I was reading this article I couldn’t help but think of all the Russian dash cam videos I’d seen on YouTube. Videos of cars sliding on ice, road ragers going at each other, and truckloads of cows tipping on their sides. Previously qualitative data was considered unreliable because it couldn’t be gathered at the scale quantiative data was gathered. It seems to be Eberstadt’s analysis proves reliable, but inconclusive because its reliance on hard data limited its ability to get into the hearts and minds of the Russian people. I sense that we may be approaching a new age of political science. Today quantitative data is plenty, whether its from social media sites or dash cams. I feel the question needs to be reevaluated with methods focused on gathering a mass amount quantitative evidence, and the problem of the dying Russian to be rediagnosed.
I agree with you in that I too was confused by the continual phrasing of “they’re only the second worst adherents of this life threatening habit!” It seems to me that being so high up in each of those categories is enough of a death sentence. But I suppose the problem is, even if that’s the answer of what the direct cause of death is, it doesn’t explain why they’re such heavy drinkers/smokers/bad eaters in the first place. The why can be just as important as the what. Furthermore, Gessen writes that violent, unexpected deaths are extremely high as well. Can smoking and drinking explain that away? I don’t think that the true answer, if such a thing exists, can be found from this sort of analysis, no matter how vigorously collected and valid the data may be.