When it comes to population policy, surprisingly, yes. Most of the countryside and many large towns subsisted on economically unviable and sometimes outright st

When it comes to population policy, surprisingly, yes. Most of the countryside and many large towns subsisted on economically unviable and sometimes outright stupid and useless sources of income, all of which abruptly went bust in the 1990s and were slowly going bust even under Soviet management the decade before. You might argue about what should have happened, but what actually did is enterprising people left for the big cities (leaving the countryside in particular basically lifeless), and the rest went into depression backed by large quantities of alcohol—that is to say, into the ridiculously high male mortality statistics of Russia, Belarus, and others. (It’s more socially acceptable for men to drink, although women are of course not exempted, and while there might be more of them alive they’re also not precisely happy.) Frankly, many of those factories and communal farms deserved to die on economic grounds, barring drastic changes. But I can’t bring myself to say that the population of the communities built around them (and frequently nothing else for a couple dozen kilometers or more) thereby deserved literal death. That’s what it’s been coming to for the last thirty years, though.