A Century of State Murder?

Death and Policy in Twentieth Century Russia

By (author) Michael Haynes, Rumy Husan

Publication date:

20 August 2003

Length of book:

288 pages

Publisher

Pluto Press

ISBN-13: 9781849641579

Russia has one of the lowest rates of adult life expectancy in the world. Average life expectancy for a man in America is 74; in Russia, it is just 59. Birth rates and population levels have also plummeted. These excess levels of mortality affect all countries that formed the former Soviet bloc. Running into many millions, they raise comparisons with the earlier period of forced transition under Stalin.

This book seeks to put the recent history of the transition into a longer term perspective by identifying, explaining and comparing the pattern of change in Russia in the last century. It offers a sharp challenge to the conventional wisdom and benign interpretations offered in the west of what has happened since 1991.

Mike Haynes and Rumy Husan have produced the first and most complete and accurate account of Russian demographic crisis from the Revolution to the present.

List of Tables
List of Figures
Preface and Acknowledgements
The USSR in the Late Stalin Era
The Four Great Mortality Crises in Twentieth-Century USSR-Russia
Glossary and Abbreviations
1. Demography – the Social Mirror?
Lies, damned lies and statistics?
Murder most foul?
A century of population change in Russia
The mirror of society?
2. The Revolt Against Class Society 1890–1928
Mortality in Tsarist Russia
The class pattern of death
War and repression
Revolution and the vision of the future
The waning dream
3. Death and the Stalin Era 1929–53
The pressure of accumulation
The total number
Death and repression
The determinants of the ‘normal’ death rate
Wars
The end of the Stalin Era
4. Policy, Inequalities and Death in the USSR 1953–85
Judicial death and repression
Imperialism and war
The pattern of normal death
Explaining the patterns of death
National variations within the USSR
vi A Century of State Murder?
5. The End of Perestroika and the Transition Crisis
of the 1990s
Perestroika and the collapse of the USSR 1985–91
Shock therapy reforms of 1992
The Impact of Reforms: low pay, poverty and inequality
Mistaken assumptions underlying the reform programme
6. ‘Normal’ deaths During the First Decade of Transition
Unprecedented peacetime mortality
Why so many deaths?
Key factors of mortality decline
7. Yeltsin, Putin and ‘Abnormal’ Deaths 1992–2002
Collective violence and ‘intentional’ deaths
Political crisis and civil unrest
Death and disease in prisons
Torture and state executions
The war in Chechnya
8. Conclusion
Class inequality and a ‘quiet violence’
A century of state murder
Appendix: Basic Data on the Prison Camp System
under Stalin
Notes
Bibliography
Index

'A vivid and chilling account of some of the most terrible events of modern history'