The collapse is most dramatic in Russia itself, said Carl Haub, the demographer who wrote the study. Even before the disastrous war in Chechnya, life expectancy for Russian men had fallen below the retirement age of 60, the result of a rising toll of stress-related heart attacks, alcoholism, accidents, murder and suicide, he said.
Russian male life expectancy at birth fell from 63.9 years in 1990 to 58.9 years in 1993, the lowest among industrialized countries. Female life expectancy also has fallen, to 71.9 years, but the 13-year gap between males and females is the largest of any country in the world, said Haub. He is director of information and education at the Population Reference Bureau, a non-profit Washington group that studies demographic trends.
The rapid decline in births -- the fertility rate fell from 1.9 in 1990 to 1.4 last year in Russia -- amounts to a striking vote of no confidence in the future, reflecting political turmoil and halting progress toward a market economy, Haub said. Instead of the fast progress toward democracy and prosperity that many Soviet people expected during the heady days in 1991 when Communist Party domination came to an end, the republics have experienced widespread bloodshed, huge refugee flows, rapid inflation and growing unemployment.
"People's outlook appears to be completely gloomy -- about whether or not they'll have a job, whether or not they'll have an apartment," Haub said. "People ask, 'Is this the kind of economy I can afford to bring another child into?' As far as a demographer is concerned, the answer right now is 'no'."
The numbers, which show fewer marriages and more divorces, have ominous implications for Russian politics, Haub said.
"If people are afraid to have children, afraid of the future, that tells us how they view their leadership," he said.
Since the break-up of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the former republics have followed diverse paths, from civil war and chaos in Georgia, for instance, to relative stability and rapid reform in Estonia. Those paths reflected great differences in economy, culture and religion: republics such as Latvia and Uzbekistan were as dissimilar from one another as Norway and Afghanistan.
But the fall in births has affected every one of the 15 former republics, Haub's study shows, even though birth rates in Central Asia remain far higher than in the European part of the former Soviet Union, Haub's study showed. He attributed the consistency of the trend to the uncertainty created by the momentous political and economic change, which causes couples to postpone childbearing.
Haub's survey found one development in the former Soviet Union that may reflect the influx of Western, and particularly American, culture and mores since the late 1980s: out-of-wedlock births, traditionally quite low, are on the rise.
The trend is most pronounced in the most Western-looking of the republics, notably Estonia, where 38 percent of births were outside of marriage in 1991.
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