I got to this material backwards — a friend who was grumpy about Masha Gessen in general sent me Adomanis' piece first, so I read his "8 things Masha Gessen Got Wrong About Russian Demography," the usual pedantic pro-Kremlin snark  — then I read her original piece, the Dying Russians in the New York Review of Books, which was a thoughtful and useful piece.

It doesn't matter if Masha Gessen herself is personally wrong about any fact or incorrect in her views — that's not what any of this is about. I don't agree with everything she writes, but I appreciate her career, and her work and her vocation of being a dissident, if you will.

Update: since several people have commented to me that I should denounce her period at Radio Svoboda here, I have to say: sorry to disappoint, but I've never taken sides in this fight. I've never gotten enough information from other side to make an informed view point. And you know what? I don't care enough, having seen how some of the things people chose to focus on — like incorrect information about Gessen's salary — and the obsession with someone's salary in the first place — aren't causes I can take on. If Svoboda could be so easily "destroyed," I'd have to say there was likely a lot wrong with it in the first place. I'm certainly for having a strong and viable Svoboda to stand up to the Kremlin. Ludmila Alexeyeva — someone with whom I worked very closely on the issue of a critique of the US broadcasting reforms long before any of you — could well be right. I certainly respect her judgement. But ultimately, I think there is so much wrong with the radios — and this is only a symptom — that the recipes for fixing Svoboda in either direction weren't enough, and a more fundamental change has to be made at the center or top, which is that the US Administration has to go back to their original mission of the Cold War — credibly deterring, countering and providing viable alternatives to the Kremlin-dominated air waves.

I don't appreciate Mark Adomanis, who has brought very little to the table in terms of insights in the years I've read him, and nothing but pro-Kremlin snark and Putin fawning seasoned with faux critiques and ultimately the worst: belittling of those who are critical of the Putin.

It's like Putin helps people like this sustain their manhood, or something. I don't get it. As American intellectuals, their default should be to distrust power, dislike the Man, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable…or something. Instead, there's this swoon — unseemly swoon — for Putin. Ugh. And again — especially disingenuous when sprinkled with these mock critiques every once in awhile just to seem credible, like, oh, noes, shouldn't have annexed the Crimea.

I'm not really going to look at this in a factual manner — someone else can do this. I'm going to look at its moral-political dimensions, which nonetheless do involve some facts.

1. First of all, does Mark Adomanis get it about how book reviews work? This is The New York REVIEW of Books. It's not Forbes or a blog. It's a book review outlet. So she took two OTHER people's books, and did what we call "review" them.  It was perhaps more of a think piece than a systematic review, but it's still a book review.

Has Mark ever reviewed a book? If he had, he'd know that when you review other people's books, you outline or explain their ideas — but that doesn't mean they are YOUR ideas. You're also not required to "correct" their mistakes, although you can. But bottom line — Mark made this extremely personal and vindictive — as one of his many slams on the Russian opposition as a pro-Kremlin tool — in an entirely stupid and inappropriate matter, because she is *reviewing the academic work of others, not putting out her own work*. If she is thinking aloud, it's on the basis of just having read and absorbed these books.

2. Second, why doesn't Adomanis pick on someone not his own size, i.e. not this female book writer and book reviewer and journalist, who is not an academic, but the actual academics who are experts in the same field as he claims to be? If he wants to argue against Nick Eberstadt in particular, who is a long-time critic of Soviet demography and an expert in this field — let him. But apparently he's too chicken to face another expert in his field, so he picks on a reviewer. Lame.

It might be that Nick Eberstadt is wrong. I don't know. I'm not an expert on demography. But I'm sure Nick would give Adomanis a run for his money.  Because Nick is critical of the Kremlin and always has been, unlike Mark, and he covered this issue for far more years than Adomanis has been alive.  BTW, Gessen has her critique of Eberstadt in her review. But Adomanis ignores that because it doesn't fit his goal: which is to do a denunciation of an opposition person.

3. Hey, did Adomanis miss the title of Gessen's book review? It's about WAYS OF DYING. It's not about birth rates; whether birth rates are improving; about whether that means the "population crisis" is over. It's more about the way Russians die more than the rate at which they die. They have among the world's highest rates of violent accidents and murders; they have among the world's highest rates of deaths due to alcoholism. They have a huge drug-related deaths figure.

Not THE highest, as Gessen, citing her authors, explains to us. It's the FORM or the MANNER in which people are dying, the sociological or philosophical REASONS for their death, not the numbers again. Adomanis is apparently not enough of a conceptual thinker, and too much of a literalist science nerd, to contemplate these higher issues. Gessen cites her authors to the effect that these deaths have to do with despair, feeling unwanted, being the superflous man, if you will. I dunno. I could do a separate post on this; I think it has to do more with spite — the explanation that Samantha Power gave in her day for what animated the Balkan wars. Hatred of other people is BIG in Russia; it goes with feelings of inadequacy in one's self. That's the issue.

4. And speaking of science nerds, let's go to one of these charts and graphs that Mark, the expert supplies us. We're supposed to appreciate his withering, devastating take-down of Gessen's point — citing her authors — that the death rate is "inexorably rising".

Well, according to his chart, it isn't "inexorably lowering," going from 1991 to 2014. That is, it isn't "inexorably" lowering if during this period it took some steep climbs  Naturally, to be honest here, we'd have to have the whole of the Soviet Union's graph to see where it stands — likely it's lower now than it was, but we'd have to see. In the periods of mass murder, obviously people's life expectancies went down dramatically.

But here's the thing. We're looking at a "lowered death rate" chart that has changed only by…four per 1,000, it looks like. Yes. Maybe in the specialized world of death rates, this is big, but it doesn't seem to be. It's not THAT big a deal. If there are now 12 people per 1000 dying instead of 16 people per 1000 dying, come on guys, did we really beef up the population?

5. And here's the thing that Gessen touches on, but Adomanis side-steps, and that is on his own cited chart. Here's a chart that shows under Yeltsin, in the 1990s, after the coup, the death rate dropped sharply by more than two per thousand. That is, sure, as I just said, 2 isn't much if 4 isn't much, but still, it's steeper, and it's counterintuitive to the received wisdom that under the "shock therapy" age of Yeltsin (supposedly) "people died". In fact they didn't. Their rates went up, particularly because they had something to live for, probably drank less, opened more businesses and thrived, and most importantly, went abroad for medical care. That made a difference.

6. Mark never addresses the issue of why there are such terrible accidents and negligence in Russia and how those rates compare with the rest of the world. It's partly a lack of value of human life — like this appalling death of a young man yesterday at the Sheremetyevo Airport from a preventable death, when he had a heart attack, the plane made an emergency landing, and yet the emergency medical care people just couldn't get their act together to come out and rescue him. Why the lack of value of human life?

7. Neither Adomanis or Gessen or the authors (at least as presented in the view) have significantly dealt with the issue of the demographic bounce still from the mass murders of Stalin. The look at the war deaths, but you have to add the mass murders, which are millions and matter. Eberstadt has written about this in other contexts, and of course as has Josif Dyadkin, who pioneered a lot of the work on looking at demographics under Stalin and later to try to figure out how many people were mass murdered (he says more than 57 million) and also then as a result were never born because their putative parents were killed.  Does this bounce still make itself felt? I should think it would, when we're only two generations from it. That is, my children's great-grandfather died of overwork, starvation or disease in the Gulag — we don't know where or when, there was merely a a death notice after his arrest on political charges. He failed to have more children as a result, and his own children become more vulnerable to early death without their father as "enemies of the people" — one sent to a factory at the age of 14, for example, the other essentially forced into exile to get a job in Turkmenistan and unable to start a family right away, and so on.

I marvel, like Masha, just how many of my in-laws have died violent deaths, so unlike the deaths of my own blood kin. My own relatives die mainly of cancer or heart attacks or perhaps a car accident or a drug overdose, thinking of a dozen families.  But in the Russian in-laws, there is:

o Chernobyl — one man was a "likvidator" and died early from cancer from radiation exposer

o suicide — a man lost his job after the break-up of the Soviet Union and didn't think he could care for his family

o drowning – at a Pioneer camp, preventable, this is just poor child care

o appendicitis — this is just lack of antibiotics in a remote village

o motorcycle accident — road safety is very poor, and exacerbated by drinking and driving

o  exposure in the steppe — after leaving a psychiatric hospital in which this uncle was forcibly interned for attempting to flee from the Soviet Union

and so on — and every family has its Gulag stories, its suicides, its early deaths. Violence, accidents, poor medical care — why?

One of the reasons I don't go to visit Russia any more is my friends have died — either the early deaths of the "Soviet male life expectancy" of 55 or 57; or journalists killed; or car accidents; or drugs/alcohol overdose. It's depressing. That's why Gessen wrote her piece — a piece that the Kremlinoid nerdlet is just too tone-deaf to appreciate.

The New York Review of Books is a review mainly of literature and philosophy and social sciences — not the hard sciences, although it has them, too. It's not the Lancet or Nature.

8. The chart on the "deaths from external" i.e. rather than natural causes can't be disputed, but again, Adomanis curiously shows no curiosity about his own chart. My God, why the steep DROP under Yeltsin — you know, those terrible '90s when people were supposedly impoverished and exploited by evil capitalists aided by the Western money-grubbing money-bags? Gosh, what happened, that their external death rates TOOK A PLUNGE in that very period??? MY GOD, what could that mean?! Could it mean that freedom and a freer economy is better for people than Putinism — which is when their death rates took a surge UP for five-six years??? Heaven forfend!

Adomanis implies that if there is a trend right now in the last five years, we can just ignore what came before. But why? We don't know that it will hold.

Put simply, if Adomanis is going to say, "Put simply, if you imagine that Russian deaths from external causes have been on a steady upward trajectory you are imagining an alternate reality" — then HE has to explain why he is IGNORING the ACTUAL reality of that steep dip and that slow climb UP under Putin. Well? You can't just look at the tail end of a trend.

Sure, the rates are now dropping again. Why? It matters to figure out why. Could it be a government anti-smoking campaign — there is one, of sorts in Russia. Could it be less vodka consumption? Could it be more access for more people to foreign medical care? Think of how many lives were saved or extended due to that factor, absent pretty much before the collapse of the Soviet Union for all but the most privileged and loyal.

I don't know, I'm not an expert, but you can be curious about these fluxuations, wonder what they mean in terms of different regnums, and you know, not be an asshole. It's not being "out of touch with reality" to believe there was a trend of "bad to worse" death rates until 2005. That was nine years ago. But it matters. It has its "bounce" still as a result. If it's better now, great.

And say. These death rates have only been "steadily going down" for nine years. Then they are flattening — plateauing. Looks like they are not going to "keep going down". So, what does that mean?

Hey, can we trust these statistics? Are they manipulated at all, you know, like elections, the press, and lots of stuff in Russia? Just saying. That would be my big question about Adomanis' charts or even the authors Gessen sites. Are the statistics trustworthy?

9. Hey, again, why the snark about the stark, steep plunges and the "periods of hope"? The ruble collapse — which is also the White House rebellion and the return of the red-browns who were never defeated as we see now, in spades — caused that. But there were periods of hope, and Adomanis can't concede them, literally not seeing the forest for the trees. It's great if there are higher expectancies now, but there were definitely these "periods of hope" when Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and while Yeltsin was still in power in his last term in 1998.

Why? Oil prices? The issue isn't to dismiss these obvious and interesting demographic footprints, but to think about them. If they change, and now today there is a better rate under the evil Putin, so what? How much of that is from the momentum built up under the "periods of hope" of the past rulers Gorbachev and Yeltsin? How much is it due to more mundane things than politics and society, i.e. quitting smoking?

Demographics obviously seems like a very exact science to Adomanis and something his narrow take thrives on. But there is more to demographics and numbers as people really associate the "betterness" of their lives — a subjective yet still influential factor — with the types of political leadership they have. People talk about the great economy they had in the Clinton years or the Reagan years, and the terrible economy of Bush 2 and Obama 1.  These are political and social debates and not Nate Silver numbers, but still worth having.

Because, as the Poles used to say in the Solidarity era when martial law was declared as "better" and "bringing peace": "if everything is so good, why is everything so bad?"

You might live another five years under Putin because of the long-term effects of government anti-alcohol or anti-smoking campaigns or foreign medical care or seat belts, for all we know. But if your quality of life is worth because you might go to jail for demonstrating or your son is killed fighting in Ukraine, then what?

 P.S. –oh, actually 10, I guess. There's that bit about Gessen's claim that people in republics that break off from Russian do better — and Adomanis' claim that they don't, based on Uzbekistan.

Well, let's see the numers for Belarus? Mark won't mention them. Better yet, the Baltics!