Masha Gessen’s article The Dying Russians seeks to answer a lofty question of why the mortality rate of young people in Russia has been so exponentially high following the fall of the Soviet Union. Gessen attempts to use historical data of other Russian eras with high mortality rates, using them as examples to rule out their causes as the cause for this particular era. Gessen’s argument fails in that by trying to provide so many different types of analysis (cultural, historical and empirical) she loses the one shining moment of her argument that could have been fully fleshed out into a more satisfying answer than “dying of broken hearts (7).” Bringing in Michelle Parson’s book “Dying Unneeded” seems to be the shining moment of this argument, the place where she could make a somewhat valid conclusion is Gessen were to analyze and contextualize this phenomenon further. By generalizing her argument, Gessen loses this close focus on what could actually provide an answer to her question.

However, there are still noticeable flaws in Parsons’ analysis as well. As Gessen’s audience we are not given any validity of Parson’s book nor the people she interviewed, and therefore it reduces the validity of Gessen’s overall argument, if she were to make one based off Parsons, claims. Moreover as pointed out in a previous post, Parsons seems to be looking at the middle-age range of Russians where Gessen is looking at younger Russians. Overall this argument is muddled and overlapping, providing historical and cultural analysis that draw the reader away from the initial question at hand and providing a catchy yet unrealistic answer to a very real Russian problem.

The claim Masha Gessen makes in The Dying Russians – that Russia is experiencing a depopulation crisis due to the people’s loss of hope – is questionable at best, and nearly impossible to believe at worst. While I’m not fundamentally opposed to the notion that something like a loss of hope can lead to a less healthy population with a consequently higher mortality rate, Gessen doesn’t really manage to convince me that this is what has been happening in Russia.

Gessen starts off on the right foot by citing anthropological works like Michelle Parson’s Dying Unneeded and describing her research. Regrettably, she soon seemingly tries to support her claim by ruling out other potential causes (drinking, smoking, etc. ) of the mortality crisis based on statistical data. I see this as an improper method that has harmed the credibility of her paper. Statistical data alone is arguably insufficient evidence to rule out a cause of Russia’s high mortality Also, any kind of “ruling out” methodology for research requires a much more expansive scope than what Gessen allows. Even if we ignore the faults in her methodology, such a claim will always seem doubtful to many.

If we accept Gessen’s conclusion as correct, then the mortality crisis starts to sound a lot like the protests talked about in texts like Lisa Wedeen’s Acting ‘As If’: Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria and James C. Scott’s Normal Exploitation, Normal Resistance. In this case, the Russian population protests a government that gives them nothing with shocking fertility and mortality rates. A notable difference between these protests and those described in the aforementioned texts, however, is that these protests seem to be subconscious – it’s not like Russians are knowingly choosing to get heart attacks. This was a major point of interest in the paper for me, as it got me thinking about how (or if) subconscious protest even exists.

Depopulation won’t please the government, but how can an action be considered rebellious if it is not even executed consciously? My opinion is that it can’t be – protest requires a mindful decision to defy your oppressor in some way or form. In fact, I think that this decision is the greatest qualifier for protest. Therefore, I can’t interpret the depopulation crisis as some kind of rebellious action or display against the Russian government.

The shortcomings of the approach used by Parsons and the erroneous conclusions that were drawn from it highlight the importance of facts and data to supplement any qualitative analysis. Without data to adjudicate theoretical disagreements, qualitative analysis is at best informed opinion. However, this is not to say that data is a panacea to otherwise intractable disagreements in theory as there are limits to what data can tell you. Thus, the best approach is to use hard data, like statistics, in conversation with soft data, like ethnographies. In the case explicated by this reading, even this hybrid approach used by Eberstadt is incapable of any definite answers, but in leveraging data analysis to refine the scope of theoretical inquiry, a social scientist is at least able to to move closer to an answer.

Given technological and conceptual limits, there are, by necessity, plenty of things that are unknowable to us now. However attempting to place limits on human knowledge and capability is a fool’s errand. Just as people a hundred years ago would not have predicted the speed of the development of medical technology or electronic communication, people now are ill-equipped to declare insurmountable technological and conceptual barriers to human understanding. As such, to preemptively declare certain things unknowable and avoid seeking their answers is to impose unjustified and ultimately self-defeating limitations.  

Gessen’s claim that “Russia is dying of a broken heart” is misplaced in scientific or even social analysis. She attempts to use a kind of middle-range theory, such as the one Ziblatt advocates for, to describe a country of over 144 million people over a range of almost 100 years. Gessen completely fails to examine the scope conditions and any limitations on generalizing her (already questionable) findings. The conclusion that the death rate in Russia is due to cardiovascular disease is quite possibly a solid one – however, she fails to substantiate it with convincing evidence. It is true that the physiological outcome of stress, mediated by many deleterious effects of the hormone cortisol, can lead to immune suppression and increase the chance of contracting disease such as CVD. However, Gessen uses ungeneralizable and unsubstantiated evidence that in no way qualifies as scientific.

Gessen’s emotional approach, beginning with an (irrelevant) sob-story about how she lost many friends to AIDS in the US and then was told she shouldn’t be surprised that her Russian friends were dying as well – literally “crying on a friend’s shoulder” – is antithetical to any type of scientific study. While emotional appeals can be effective in journalism, Gessen’s article masquerades as scientific analysis of Russia’s high death rate, a quantitative statistic. Scientists of all kinds, including those in “soft” sciences, strive for impartiality because emotion leads to distortion such as confirmation bias. Gessen’s emotional connection to the country also dissuades her from considering what Scott proposed – that people may lie to analysts to portray themselves or their culture in a certain light. Parsons’ “long, unstructured interviews” offer only the perspectives of several in millions, and there is no guarantee that that these perspectives are reliable.

The weakest aspect of Gessen’s analysis is when she connects the “brief breaks in the downward spiral” with periods “of greater hope,” namely the Kruschev and Gorbachev eras. There is nothing that indicates causality between these eras and hope, or hope and low death rate. It would be more accurate to discuss the effects of less-repressive regimes and more open economies on, for example, food availability and nutrition, or stillbirths. Gessen states, “death and birth statistics appear to reflect nothing but despair.” Not only does she imply causality here, she implies exclusive causality! This is a huge oversight and inappropriate for any remotely scientific analysis.

Gessen’s piece begins with what feels like random anecdotal evidence for a rising mortality rate. She anthropological and sociological evidence in the first few pages as an introduction to her claim that more and more Russians are dying. Gessen jumps from the “unstructured interviews” conducted by Michelle Parsons to broad historical trends to economic conditions, all as possibilities for the cause of what seems like increased death rates in Russian. Her use of a great number and variety of possible causes does not make up for the fact that they are quite possibly unrelated. In other words, attempting to link together cultural, institutional, and historical arguments is not an effective method to summarize a specific trend that occurred over a vast number of years, specifically in the case of the Russian deaths. This becomes obvious in the latter half of the book review, when Gessen provides empirical facts about the deaths that occurred during times of famine, war, and emigration. While these periods of time had distinct, determinable causes of deaths, others did not. But this is not to say that they can or should only be explained by sociological or circumstantial evidence. Number of deaths and mortality rates are undeniably quantifiable statistics. We have records that keep track of the number of deaths, people’s age and cause of death, etc. Yes, Russia certainly has a distinct history and culture that has led its population to certain unique points of despair or hope that may or may not link to death rates; however, this is not to say that we should turn to sociological methods only as an explanation for scientific occurrences.