Life Expectancy in the Soviet Union
Part I: Cockshott and the price of really existing socialism
This is the first part of the ongoing series of essays on the Soviet and socialist demography, it’s the least productive and most idiotic one. It concerns itself with a note about an article from Paul Cockshotti in the Monthly Review:
Crisis of Socialism and Effects of Capitalist Restoration by Paul Cockshott
No Apparent Baseline Mortality
The political arguments related to the Russian 20th century are deeply tied to the philosophical consequentialism and demographical estimates of increases in life expectancy and excess mortality because arguments about the effects of socialism and post-socialism hinge on them.
A practical problem exists that makes all relevant rhetorics far more complicated. It’s hard to establish a well-agreed baseline in Russian life expectancy and mortality at any point in time until the mid-2000s. Through the years, we see a rapid increase, then stagnation and collapse, punctuated by the rapid improvement of the anti-alcohol campaign and escalation in the first years of the 90s, only to revert to stable moderate growth in the mid-2000s.
It’s specifically bad for male life expectancy which sees an obvious decline. This is a male life expectancy painted red or blue depending on whether it was higher or lower than a previous year.
9 Million Killed by the Soviets?
A great selectivity of baseline years and incompetence in demographic calculation are omnipresent in most exercises related to the topic. One of the most egregious, obfuscating, and bad-faith examples comes from Paul Cockshott.
He selected the highest point of the anti-alcohol campaign (capitalism was abolished with vodka) to produce the lowest crude mortality at a peak, disregarded the effects of population structure (aging) on crude mortality, and ended with 12 million dead Russians due to excess mortality.
Let us do the same exercise for the Soviet Union from the lowest point of crude mortality and continue while the life expectancy deteriorates and the population ages. The lowest point in crude mortality in the World Bank data was achieved in 1964 at 7.395 per 1000. We start from it and proceed until 1985, the last year when socialism still existed.
Notes: Figures amount to some 8 million deaths over twenty years. Source: “Death Rate, Crude (per 1,000 people) – Russian Federation,” compared with total population, 1964–1985, World Bank, available at http://data.worldbank.org.
This gives up 8 million dead Russians in 21 years. If we continue it for 2 more years (1964-1987), to achieve Cockshott’s 23 years (1986-2009), we will reach 9.3 million.
https://www.lifetable.de/Country/Country?cntr=RUS
The Human Life-Table Database
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CDRT.IN?end=1985&locations=RU&start=1964
Crude Mortality, Russia (1964-1985), World Bank
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?end=1985&locations=RU&start=1964
Population, Russia (1964-1985), World Bank