> It is a documented fact that Russian life expectancy dropped immediately after the fall of the USSR. I used to work with some Russian insurers maany years ag

> It is a documented fact that Russian life expectancy dropped immediately after the fall of the USSR. I used to work with some Russian insurers maany years ago. What they told me is that they believed life expectancy hasn't changed much, but that the Soviet data was massaged to present a better picture. Later on, the quality of the data dropped, due to general chaos, so insurers swapped to using the massaged Soviet tables - figuring that the magnitude of massaging is comparable to the improvements in life expectancy since fall of USSR.