Dying Unneeded: The Cultural Context of the Russian Mortality Crisis by Michelle A. Parsons (review)

Russia has been experiencing a unique population crisis. With total fertility rates ranging between 1.2 and 1.4 over the last two decades (well below the replacement level of 2.1) and a rapidly aging population, the country’s birthrates resemble demographic trends of other (both Eastern and Western) European countries. Unlike other European countries, however, Russia has significantly high mortality rates and a significantly truncated life expectancy at birth for both women and men. In these regards, Russian statistics more closely resemble population trends in the developing world than in Europe. In 1995, the apex of Russia’s population crisis, life expectancy for men was estimated to be a mere 58 years. In 2009, life expectancy for men rose to 62.8 years (and 74.7 for women) (Federal State Statistics Service 2011). This means that approximately 45 percent of males who turned 15 in 2009 will not survive to celebrate their 60th birthdays.

The mortality crisis has an undeniable presence in the lives of ordinary Russian citizens. On the now canceled Russian TV show “Paris Hilton’s Projector,” a member of the audience asked a popular Russian comedian, “Why do Russian men lead shorter lives [compared to their counterparts in the West]?” The comedian was quick on his feet: “Because they live at a higher velocity.”¹ The joke nicely captures the focus of Michelle A. Parsons’s book, Dying Unneeded: The Cultural Context of the Russian Mortality Crisis. She too is unsatisfied with an array of existing epidemiological explanations, and she is searching for an answer in culture and in the everyday experiences of ordinary Russians. The book is concerned with the little-understood issue of Russian mortality, especially mortality among working-age men. Yet, the book moves beyond the strictly epidemiological explanations that dominate existing literature. Parsons situates population shifts associated with the fall of the Soviet Union within broader social and political contexts and illuminates local cultural concepts that give meaning to both life and death in post-Soviet Russia.

In eight relatively concise chapters, Parsons documents how those most affected by the mortality crisis—“men and women between 55 and 70 years old in 2006–2007” (5) who have spent their entire adult lives in a city (Moscow) with one of the highest mortality rates—experience the crisis. Studying this generation’s perceptions and experiences of the fall of the Soviet Union, Parsons argues that “being needed”—by both others and the state—is what made life worth living in the Soviet Union. The dramatic political and social changes that followed its fall crippled the sense of “being needed” through which people asserted themselves in society. Linking social experiences with death, Parsons further asserts that the dissolution of social relations, created by the experience of social exclusion and isolation brought about by the breakdown of the Soviet Union, has become “a distal driver of the mortality crisis” (11).

Although death is the focus of Parsons’s ethnography, the book begins with the question of “what makes life worth living for men and women in Russia” (20). The first two chapters analyze the cultural concepts of space and order through which Parsons’s informants have been trying to make sense of mortality and the fall of the Soviet Union. The most fascinating part of Parsons’s study—and in my mind, the core of the book’s argument—discusses the following paradox: although her informants had spent a lifetime trying to circumvent the Soviet system, they now long for the order it once imposed. What they desire, she writes, are “the social connections of the past, which were structured and granted potency by the Soviet order” (52).

For Parsons’s informants, the experience of “becoming unneeded” is grounded in space (prostor). Since the early 1990s, they have communicated their experiences of political and economic change through a local cultural concept of prostor—both physical and metaphysical. For example, older Muscovites understand the new...