It is true that from the sixties onwards, life expectancy declined. However, the process became more marked after 1991. Male life expectancy dropped precipitously at this point (over ten years, I believe). However, as this article shows, women have now started to see a decline.
Simon
Window on Eurasia: Female Mortality Rates Rising in the Russian Federation Paul Goble
Tartu, May 23 -- Mortality rates among Russian men have extraorinarily high, but such rates among Russian women are now on the increase as well, a development that is reducing the life expectancies of Russian women and disturbing demographers and policy makers alike in the Russian Federation. Indeed, the differences in life expectancy rates among Russian men and Russian women have been one of the most remarked-upon features of that country’s demographic landscape. For the last generation, Russian women have lived 12 to 14 years longer than Russian men, one of the greatest differences in the world. But according to a report in the latest „Demoscope Weekly” issued by the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Center for Demography and Human Ecology, that situation may now be changing less because men are dying younger, although that is still happening, but because Russian women are (http://www.polit.ru/2005/05/18/demoscope201_print.html). This reverses the positive trend in life expectancy among Russian women observed between the 1960s and 1989 when average life expectancies among this group rose from 72 years to 74.6 years. This rate then fell to to 71.2 years in 1994 and, despite a small uptick in 1998, has been falling since that time. As distrubing as this development is overall, its sources are even more worrisome because on two often-reported key fronts, Russian women have been doing much better in recent years. Infant mortality rates among Russian women have been stable or in decline for most of the recent period. And declines in the death rate among Russian women who have abortions and of the number of Russian women electing that procedure – two developments that helped explain much of the improve in life expectancies among Russian women over the past two generations – been significant as well. But neither of these positive developments has been sufficient to overcome the impact of other trends, ones that the authors of the „Demoscope Weekly” report say increasingly resemble the causes of deaths among men and justifies their speaking of „’the masculinization’” of death among Russian women. In recent years, the report notes, Russian women have increasingly succumbed from such traditionally masculine diseases as alcohol-related cyrrhosis of the liver, lung diseases, and a variety of circulatory diseases. Moreover, female death rates have not only have dramatically increased throughout the working age population but are rising in ever younger age cohorts of the that population. The report’s authors provide the following data to make their point: The rate of deaths from cyrrhosis of the liver among Russian women has increased more than 20 times from the base period of 1965-84 to that of 2000-2003. And the rate of deaths from alcohol poisoning among Russian women between those two periods increased 2.5 times. In yet another trend that parallels that of Russian men, the report’s authors note, working-age Russian women just like their male counterparts are increasingly dying from accidents. Indeed, between 2000 and 2003 alone, accident-related deaths among Russian women rose 1.8 times. On the basis of these numbers, the authors of this report conclude that the existing large difference in life expectancies among Russian men and Russian women -- a difference that has shown relatively little change in recent years -- is now likely to decline sometime in the near future. But that will happen, the report’s authors insist, „not because of the lengthening of life expectancy among men but rather because of its shortening among women.” And those trends in turn will only add to the Russian Federation’s demographic woes – and to the economic and social problems such trends inevitably entail.
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