You wouldn’t think of a European community of being so insanely pro Russia, yet on every single post mentioning Russia, any negative comments about Russia or their government will get downvoted to hell, some people get banned. I would not be surprised if I am banned or downvoted for posting this. People who are not just blatantly spamming Kremlin propaganda, please say why you are so pro Russia, to someone confused.
Regarding the death rate and life expectancy, I believe I mentioned this before but the graphs don’t support what you’re saying here. Death rates started climbing since the 1960s in Russia, and that trend was only reversed post-collapse (in your graph). And the supposed spike is not wildly out of line with that rising trend line since the 1960s. Furthermore, it seems to line up with a birth rate spike approx. 70 years earlier, which matches the life expectancy in Russia during that time. So it’s not clear that the collapse caused these extra deaths, or that there were just more people dying of natural causes/old age-related ailments because a large cohort of the population reached life expectancy at that time. The graph certainly does not seem to support the reading that it was due to the collapse. Birth rates also started climbing post-collapse (but that can be interpreted both positively as well as negatively so it’s harder to judge in isolation).
Similarly with life expectancy, trend line largely flatlined during the Soviet era after an initial strong climb (caused mostly by advancements in treatments for common age-related issues like heart diseases, same reason it climbed similarly in the West during this time), saw a dip post-collapse but then started rising again, for the first time in decades. That’s not because the Soviets did materially worse necessarily, it’s likely again due to advancements in medicine discovered in the West now spreading properly to the former Soviet states.
The collapse was certainly rough and had plenty of bad effects (see your income graphs for example, excellent example), don’t get me wrong. But death rate/life expectancy are imo very weak evidence of this, or can even be construed as counter-evidence.
We’ve discussed this before, at best I can say we agreed to disagree. With the immense economic collapse came, internally to the Soviets, an extreme drop in the ability to feed themselves and get proper healthcare. Prostitution skyrocketed, and with it came sexually transmitted diseases (this wasn’t regulated prostitution, but the criminal kind that is even more dangerous). Same with drug and alcohol abuse, violent and organized crime, and more. These are all standard effects from economic collapse.
Outside of the USSR, trading partners that relied heavily on the Soviets, like Cuba and the DPRK, underwent extreme turmoil. The Special Period in Cuba and the Arduous March in the DPRK could have been mitigated by a standing Soviet Union, but instead they had to largely fend for themselves, creating mass famine. While there was no famine of the same scale and intensity in the former Soviet Union, the economic collapse was still significant enough to result in excess deaths internally that amounted to a major tragedy.