regarding issues such as life expectancy were often overly optimistic. At worst, the compilation of standard indicators (such as infant mortality rates) was altered to improve the relative standing of the Soviet Union in comparison to capitalist countries. Most significantly, demographic information was withheld from publication, and sometimes not collected. In spite of achieving remarkable improvements in public health and high rates of population growth in decades after World War II, as its predecessor, employed population information to further its ideology as well as to inform policy development.
The post-Soviet era is marked by dire demographic trends. Rapid and wide scale increases in mortality and marked declines in already low fertility and marriage rates generated negative natural rates of increase throughout the 1990s. Population decline was avoided only due to substantial immigration from other successor states during the period. This period has been identified as the most dramatic peacetime demographic collapse ever observed. Aspects of the crisis are linked to long-term processes begun in the Soviet period, but were significantly exacerbated by economic and institutional instability of the later period.
Increasing male mortality, especially among older working-aged males, gained momentum during the 1990s. Estimates vary, but official estimates reported a six-year decline in male life expectancy between 1985 and 1995. Female life expectancy also declined, however more modestly. Deaths from lung cancer, accidents, suicide, poisoning, and other causes related to alcohol consumption underpin the change in mortality, but death rates for heart disease and cancer also increased. Period explanations focus on the stress generated by the economic transition, linking that stress to the mortality increase. Age effect models argue that men at these ages are somehow uniquely susceptible to stress. Cohort explanations point out that men in the later working ages (50-59) in 1990 represent the birth cohorts of 1940s, and the declining mortality of the 1990s is an echo of the deprivations of the post World War II period. Each explanation contributed to explaining the mortality increase, which took place amidst health care and infrastructural collapse.
The Soviet system of health care was very successful in improving public health during the early years of the regime, and during the initial period after World War II, however the distribution and organization of care led to diminishing return in the later years of the regime and the organizational structure proved ineffective in the post- Soviet period. During the 1990s financial crises lead to serious shortages of medical supplies, wage arrears in the governmental health sector, and the rise of private pay clinics and pharmacies. Increased poverty rates, especially among the growing pension aged population, precluded health care access. Public works (hospitals, prisons, sewer systems, etc.) were poorly maintained during the late Soviet era, and contributed to the resurgence of old health risks such as cholera, typhus, and drug resistant forms of tuberculosis during the 1990s. The reemergence of infectious disease shocked demographers and epidemiologists, who previously contended improvements in mortality were permanent, and that deaths infectious diseases were a unique characteristic of undeveloped societies. The resurgence of infectious diseases includes HIV/AIDS. The numbers of infected were low, but in 2003 HIV infection rates were projected to increase in the near future.
Russia’s post-Soviet demographic crises generated concerns over declining population size, especially in the Far East where border security is a concern. Immigration helped maintain population size without shifting the ethnic composition, but anti-immigrant sentiments were strong during the late 1990s. In 2002 government attention had turned to below replacement fertility, but as in the rest of Europe the fertility rate remained very low. During the second decade after Soviet rule, demographic trends were cause for serious concern, but indicators, if not political attitudes, were stabilized. See also: COLONIAL EXPANSION; COLONIALISM; EMPIRE, USSR AS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Barbara, and Silver, Brian. (1985). “Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR.” Slavic Review 44(3):517-536. Applebaum, Anne. (2003). Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday.
Blum, Alain, and Troitskaya, Irina. (1997). “Mortality in Russia During the 18th and 19th Century: Local Assessments Based on the Revizii.” Population: An English Selection 9:123-146. Clem, Ralph. (1986). Research Guide to the Russian and Soviet Censuses. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Coale, Ansley; Anderson, Barbara; and Harm, Erna. (1979). Human Fertility in Russia since the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. DaVanzo, Julie, and Grammich, Clifford. (2002). Dire Demographics: Population Trends in the Russian Federation. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation. Field, Mark. (1995). “The Health Crisis in the Soviet Union: A Report form the ‘Post-War’ Zone.” Social Science and Medicine 41(11):1469-1478. Feshbach, Murray. (1995). Ecological Disaster: Cleaning up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute. Hochs, Steven. (1994). “On Good Numbers and Bad: Malthus, Population Trends and Peasant Standard of Living in Late Imperial Russia.” Slavic Review 53(1): 41-75. Kingkade, Ward. (1997). Population Trends: Russia. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census. Lorimer, Frank. (1946). Population of the Soviet Union: History and Prospects. Pompano Beach, FL: AMS Publishing. Lutz, Wolfgang; Scherbov, Sergei; and Volkov, Andrei. (1994). Demographic Trends and Patterns in the Soviet Union before 1991. New York: Routledge. Patterson, K. David. (1995). “Mortality in Late Tsarist Russia: A Reconnaissance.” Social History of Medicine 8(2):179-210. Wheatcroft, Stephen. (2000). “The Scale and the Nature of the Stalinist Repression and Its Demographic Significance: On Comments by Keep and Conquest.” Europe-Asia Studies 52(6):1143-1159.
CYNTHIA J. BUCKLEY
Throughout its history, the denga was a small silver coin, usually irregular in shape, with a fluctuating silver content, weighing from 0.53 to 1.3 grams (depending on region and period). The word denga was a lexicological borrowing into Russian from Mongol. The unit’s origins are traced to Moscow where, beginning in the 1360s and 1370s, for the first time since the eleventh century, Rus princes began to strike coins. By early 1400s, dengi (pl.) were minted in other eastern Rus lands (Nizhe-gorod and Ryazan) and by the 1420s in Tver, Novgorod, and Pskov. Thereafter, dengi were minted throughout the Rus lands by various independent princes and differed in weight. However, uniformity in weight, according to Moscow’s standards, was introduced to the various principalities as the Muscovite grand princes absorbed them during the course of the second half of the fifteenth century.
For most of its history, six dengi made up an altyn, and two hundred dengi the Muscovite ruble. Novgorod also struck local dengi from the 1420s until the last decades of the fifteenth century, but their weight and value were twice the amount of the dengi minted in Moscow. While the unit denga was discontinued and replaced by the kopek with the monetary reforms of Peter the Great, the Russian word dengi came to designate money in general. See also: ALTYN; COPPER RIOTS; GRIVNA; KOPECK; RUBLE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Noonan, Thomas S. (1997). “Forging a National Identity: Monetary Politics during the Reign of Vasilii I (1389 -1425).” In Moskovskaya Rus (1359-1584): Kul’tura i istoricheskoe samosoznanie/Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1359-1584, ed. A. M. Kleimola and G. D. Lenhoff. Moscow: ITZ-Garant. Spasskii, I. G. (1967). The Russian Monetary System: A His-torico-Numismatic Survey, tr. Z. I. Gorishina and rev. L. S. Forrer. Amsterdam: Jacques Schulman.
(1872-1947), general, commander of White armies in Southern Russia during the Russian civil war.
Anton Denikin was born the son of a retired border guard officer in Poland. His own military career began in the artillery, from which he entered the General Staff Academy. He served in the Russo-Japanese War and the World War I, where he commanded the Fourth, or “Iron,” Brigade (later a division). Beginning the war with the rank of major general, following the February 1917 Revolution, he received a rapid series of promotions, from command of the Eighth Corps to command of the Russian Western, and then Southwestern,
DENMARK, RELATIONS WITH
Fronts. In September 1917, however, he and a number of other officers were arrested as associates of Commander-in-Chief General Lavr Kornilov in the latter’s conflict with Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky. Denikin was released from prison following the Bolshevik coup. He headed to Novocherkassk, where he participated in the
