At the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, all the countries of the former Soviet Union experienced a dramatic mortality crisis leading to considerable losses in life expectancy. Nowhere was this so important as in Russia where between 1988 and 1994 men lost nearly eight years of life expectancy and women 3.5 years. Surprisingly, there was little attention to this in Russia, and in particular virtually no epidemiological attempt made to understand what was happening.

However, this is perhaps not as unexpected as it first seems because, as Vasiliy Vlassov clearly describes in this issue, epidemiology in Russia (and almost everywhere else in the former Soviet Union) was exclusively concerned with infectious diseases.1Epidemiology of non-communicable diseases was not even part of the curriculum of medical students, and although infectious diseases did increase during the early 1990s, the leading causes of the mortality crisis were cardiovascular diseases and accidents and violence.

One remarkable exception to the apparent indifference of scientists to the increasing mortality was a team of Russian demographers from Moscow's Centre for Demography and Human Ecology, who in collaboration with demographers from the French Institut des Etudes Démographiques investigated thoroughly the reasons for this …