In “The Dying Russians” Masha Gessen takes into consideration a puzzle that started out as an obvious source of confusion for her. She explains her personal relationships to those who died somewhat under the radar (of her knowledge): “her friend,” a “newspaper reporter [she’d] seen a week earlier,” (2). She goes on to revealing how she “cried on a friend’s shoulder” (3), and the difficulty of processing these deaths. While this emotionality doesn’t necessarily have to affect her research, it may well have lead her to remain so wedded to the question of deaths over the course of her study. What her question (why Russians are dying in numbers) becomes, however, is beyond any scope of a successful research endeavor. From the post-war period to present day, Gessen’s time frame yields only in size to the vastness of her country in study. Perhaps in an attempt to do justice to this broad scope, Gessen endeavors to analyze an extensive data set, from Parsons’s more anthropological approach with her “months-long conversation” (2), to Eberstadt’s historical-trend based research. Between these two examinations, contradictory conclusions arise, like whether a younger or more middle-aged population represents the dying population. While I do respect and appreciate her comprehensive collection of evidence, I simply find it as a result of her inability to narrow down the scope of her research question. Indeed, such a broad question certainly can lead an investigator down several avenues of more specific research, and she might have been better off following one rather than sticking to her more general puzzle, for which she demonstrates a difficulty to explain with specific answers, as one would expect.