Oh good, I’m not the only one, then!
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True, but given the entirety of history, I would say the nutshell cause is a series of really bad governments. Capitalism, communism, monarchy, the Russians always get the most pathological form.
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Are you serious? That sounds rather unAmur’can of them. 
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Life expectancy in pre-Soviet Russia was pretty terrible for most people, unsurprisingly - after all, it was a feudal society. After the revolution, life expectancy was on a strong upwards climb until it stalled out in the '50s/'60s, when it more or less reached parity with the US, flattened out, then took a plunge with the fall of the Soviet Union. So despite all the fucked up things going on in the Soviet Union, the one Soviet communism did do was improve life expectancy. When you look at all the factors that are attributed with decreasing life expectancy post-communism, the counters to those factors by a good government would essentially be to institute various socialist programs…
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Well, leveled off means 6.3 years shorter than the US in 1990. And that is after a slight recovery in the late 80s. Google has a lovely interactive graph if you google Russian life expectancy. Compare the shape of those lines… I’m not trying to make this a socialism vs capitalism thing, I mean we are comparing them to capitalist countries.
Yeah, the US continued to improve, and yeah, the US is actually not a great comparison point because life expectancy is pretty crap in the US compared to almost all first world nations. The facts remain, however…
Reminds me of the Soviet-era joke: Under capitalism, man oppresses man; under communism, it’s the other way around.
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