Russia: Life and Death Under the Various Leaders,1960-2016

One can't escape the "western" adulation, central European disinterest, and Russian anger about the legacies of Mikhail Gorbachev, who has recently passed away. So, I decided to take a quick empirical look at how Russia did in terms of Life Expectancy at Birth (LEB)--a variable widely regarded as an excellent measure of the overall quality of life in a society--under its various Soviet-era party Central Committee first secretaries / post-Soviet presidents. (The data come from the World Bank's World Development Indicators online dataset.  All I do below is look at one simple graph and summarize some basic stylized facts. I am not implying any causation, and of course much more complex, more historical, etc., analyses should be done--this really is just a quick peek.)

So, here it is, Russia's LEB figures (a synthetic measure indicating the average length of life a baby born in a particular year can expect to live, computed from age-specific mortality records) as compared to the world average, between 1960 and 2016. I am only looking at Russia--NB: this does not include the other 14 former Soviet republics--for purposes of comparing the various Soviet and post-Soviet periods to the world mean. Of course other comparisons are possible and would be very informative. For easier orientation, I have marked the periods of political leadership.

It seems that, until the mid 1970s, Russia was 

• stably above the world average (and remained so until 1993--arguably this position above the world mean is the biggest finding of this little exercise--), and
• growing, albeit
• less steeply than the rest of the world.

In the mid-seventies, we notice a mild but clear downward turn in Russia's LEB. In other words, the second half of the Brezhnev era appears to have marked the crisis of sorts, if not the end, of Russia's socialist welfare system, although the decline is relatively minor (1.2 life years in the course of 6 years)--and the end of the Brezhnev-years also shows a slight increase.

Under Andropov--still Soviet--Russia underwent a decline of a magnitude similar to the second half of the Brezhnev period. The slope of the downfall was steeper because it happened in a shorter time. The subsequent, "transition" year with Chernenko shows a minor rebound.

When Gorbachev took the helm of the USSR, Russia had a LEB of 67.9 years. At first, things appeared to improve quickly: Russia's LEB peaked around 69.4 years. The first two years of Gorbachev's rule show an increase in Russia's LEB that is, for the first time in the period under study here, steeper than, and still above, the world average. 

Following the peak in 1986--i.e., in the middle of Gorbachev's rule--Russian LEB went into a decline. The decline became especially steep in 1990. When Gorbachev stepped down, and state socialism "as we knew it" went down the drain, in 1991, Russia had an LEB of 68.5--a figure basically indistinguishable from the point when Gorbachev came to power. By then, given the monotonic increase of world mean LEB--that represented a much worse global position.

So, as for "Gorbi's" record: It is mixed, at best. Neither stellar, nor a disaster. Kind of boring and certainly lacking the savior / evil character ascribed to him on geopolitical grounds.

A veritable social disaster came, undeniably, in the Yeltsin years. In the first years of the rule by the alcohol addict first post-state-socialist president of the Russian Federation ruling over, and by means of, a mafia-like "family", the people of Russia lost 4 (FOUR) years of their LEB. This should have been a major discussion point, a breaking news all over the world: The Russian Federation fell, for the first time, below the world mean LEB in 1993 and, by 1994, it had a LEB figure approximately 1.5 years below the world mean.

The Russian LEB rebounded, sort of, still under Yeltsin so that, in 1998, Russia was on par with the world mean--for one year. Ever since--and that includes the long Putin period that followed the Yeltsin years--the Russian Federation has been tugging along below the world mean. At the lowest point--in 2003--Russia's LEB was 3.5 years lower than the world average. Russia reached the same level of LEB as it had in 1991--at the point of the end of the USSR--in 2009. 

It took a whopping 18 years for Russia's social system to work itself back to where it was at the end of state socialism. 

Since then, Russia has been, ever so gingerly, narrowing its gap below the world mean (i.e., its LEB has been increasing more steeply than the world mean) but it had not quite caught up with the world by the end of the dataset (2016).  Whether the Russian Federation will be able to "catch up" with the world, given the subsequent global COVID19 pandemic and the protracted war against Ukraine, is doubtful.