Michael Haynes & Rumy Husan 
A Century of State Murder? [PDF ebook] 
Death and Policy in Twentieth Century Russia

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.

Jadual kandungan

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

Mengenai Pengarang

Rumy Husan is Senior Lecturer at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex. He is co-author of A Century of State Murder? (Pluto, 2003).