On Infant Mortality in the Soviet Union

In an article, Infant mortality trends in the Soviet Union, published last year in this journall Ellen Jones and Fred W. Grupp argue that the officially reported increase in infant mortality rates in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s is largely attributable to improvements in the vital registry system in the USSR's southern tier republics. They present this interpretation and supporting evidence as a refutation of the findings of a report by Christopher Davis and myself that the increase was real and significant.2 Errors of omission and of commission in the article by Jones and Grupp call into question the validity of their argument. To start with an error of both omission and commission, the authors fail to make reference to the work of M. S. Bednyy, M.D., head, since 1979, of an innovative research unit on medical demography formed by the Ministry of Health of the Russian Republic, and extensively cited in the Davis/Feshbach report.3 Bednyy cites numerous reasons for the real increase in infant mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1970s-including an increase in the number of children with congenital anomolies and in the proportions of children born prematurely; and a lack of correlation of the growth in the numbers of doctors and hospital beds with health indicators. Moreover he provides abundant evidence of increases in mortality at all ages. The extensiveness of underreporting in the 1950s and 1960s-let alone in the 1930s, which could have had nothing to do with the alleged increase in the 1970s-can be disputed by reference to the very evidence that Jones and Grupp themselves provide. (I do not take issue with their evidence from ethnographer Kozlov; however, Eberstadt's response [see below] to the Jones and Grupp article provides information from an interview with Kozlov, which modifies the strength of Kozlov's very brief assertion concerning underreporting in the Central Asian republics in the 1970s.) Take, for example, the

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