As I’ve shown with other posts, Russia is doing a lot better than what a lot of western corporate media, and even some of our most senior politicians, claim.   As the below excerpt of an article by demographics expert Mark Adomanis shows, Russia still has a ways to go on some mortality and quality of life issues, but the progress that has been made in the Putin era in certain areas is remarkable and deserves to be acknowledged:

As I hope the graphs demonstrate, a decade or two ago Russians were living in a totally different universe. The rates of death from various kinds of social ills were so much higher as to be essentially incomparable. However, quietly and with little fanfare Russia has seen significant improvements, which have not abated since the start of the economic slowdown at the end of 2014. Indeed, in early 2016 the evidence suggests that improvements to Russian public health have actually accelerated, with overall mortality plunging by around 5%.

 

Yes, there is still a lot of work to be done. The murder rate, in particular, is still a lot higher than it is in Europe. But the differences are increasingly differences of degree, not of kind. The suicide rate, for example, is currently about 76% higher in Russia than in the EU. That sounds absolutely terrible until you consider that, back in 2001, the Russian suicide rate was 340% of the EU’s.

Full article with graphs and charts here:  http://www.intellinews.com/comment-russia-is-becoming-more-european-despite-the-politics-and-rhetoric-99883/