Russia's Population Crisis: The Migration Dimension

• Increasing mortality. The overall death rate grew steadily from 1991 until peaking in 1994, then gradually abating. This reflects the well-publicized increase in male (and, less markedly, female) mortality during the first half of the 1990s. The male death rate jumped from 11.6 per thousand in 1990 to 17.8 per thousand in 1994, then declined somewhat to 15.0 per thousand in 1997. The mortality increase has been attributed to a host of factors associated with the political and economic changes following the Soviet collapse: economic and social distress, deterioration of the health care system, widespread alcoholism, and growing homicide and industrial accident rates.