Patterns of Cohort Mortality in the Soviet Population

DEMOGRAPHERS HAVE TAKEN GREAT INTEREST in mortality trends of the population of the Soviet Union. The decline in life expectancy at birth among males in the late 1960s and the rise in reported infant mortality in the early 1970s not only contradicted the assumption of monotonic improvement in mortality with economic development but also highlighted the high mortality of the Soviet population compared with most other industrialized countries. Recent data for the Soviet Union show another reversal in mortality. The infant mortality rate for the country as a whole, which rose after 1971 to a peak in 1977, has declined somewhat since then. Also, since the end of the 1970s, both life expectancy at birth and age-specific mortality rates at most ages have improved for both sexes. Nonetheless, both infant mortality and mortality at older ages (especially for males) remain high compared with other developed countries. The most common interpretation of the trends in Soviet mortality has been that they reflect some combination of worsening overall health habitspoor diet, abuse of alcohol, and smoking-and a deterioration of the quality of public health programs in the 1960s and 1970s. Several Soviet and Western scholars, however, have suspected the presence of significant effects of earlier population calamities on the long-term mortality rates of people who were most seriously affected by those events. Such a cohort mortality effect would occur if the experience of an event contributed to higher (or lower) mortality than would be expected among members of the cohort as they aged. Since one sees pronounced effects of wars, agricultural Collectivization, and the 1932-33 famine on the age distribution and flow of births in the Soviet Union, it is reasonable to expect these events to have had some long-term effects on mortality as well.