1944–
A mathematical demographer who made mortality and life expectancy legible
His calculation that male life expectancy rose by 3.2 years to 65 in 1987 translated the policy debate into the language of mortality.
Evgeny Andreev is a demographer who combined mathematical rigor with practical statistical work to study mortality in Russia and the Soviet Union. His decomposition method made it possible to trace changes in life expectancy by age and cause of death, while his calculation of a 3.2-year rise in male life expectancy to 65 by 1987 became a key measure of the health outcome associated with the anti-alcohol campaign. His research on alcohol-related mortality placed policy effects within longer statistical and methodological contexts rather than reducing them to a simple political narrative.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1967Graduated in mathematics, Moscow State University
- 1970Received a PhD in physical and mathematical sciences, Moscow State University
- 1970–1975Senior researcher, Demography Division, USSR statistical institute
- 1975–2000Head of the population-information laboratory in the state statistical research system
- 2000–2005Head of the Mortality Analysis and Forecasting Laboratory, Institute of National Economic Forecasting, Russian Academy of Sciences
- 2005–2011Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
- 2017–현재Head of the International Laboratory for Population and Health, HSE University
Related historical events
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarResearcher of Soviet war lossesHe estimated the USSR's demographic losses in 1941–1945 at 26.6 million.
- 1985–1988The Anti-Alcohol Campaignmathematical demographerProvided the calculation that male life expectancy rose 3.2 years to 65 by 1987, a core health-outcome statistic.
From mathematics to demography, and counting the war's dead (1970s-1990s)
Andreev completed the mechanics and mathematics faculty at Moscow State University and its postgraduate programme, receiving a candidate degree in the physical and mathematical sciences in 1970 with a dissertation on convex polyhedra in Lobachevsky space. In 1970 his wife asked Aron Boyarsky, director of a research institute under the USSR Central Statistical Administration, whether he needed a mathematician, and Boyarsky drew him into demography. His first assignment was to build life tables for the USSR and its union republics from the 1970 all-Union census: the institute's tables had all been compiled by hand on calculators, and no one there was equipped to take the task on. He wrote his first demographic study in 1971 and published his first demographic article in 1972.
In the late 1980s he joined the calculation of the war's demographic losses. When military historians prepared a book on the armed forces' losses and the authorities required a report on civilian losses as well, the Central Statistical Administration assembled demographers; Andreev volunteered with Leonid Darsky and Tatyana Kharkova to conduct a documentary study. The three built a full population model, adjusting the 1939 census and projecting the population year by year to the beginning of 1946. Central to the work was an archival letter in which statistical officials described the corrections they had made to the 1939 census; for the age and sex pattern of famine mortality they drew on Finland's well-documented late nineteenth-century famine. Their result ran to roughly 25-30 million people.
His estimate was formulated as 26.6 million demographic losses for the USSR in 1941-1945 and circulated widely in scholarship and official discussion. Andreev was explicit about the limits of precision: he held that the demographic balance method could not narrow the range beyond roughly 25-30 million, and noted that mass emigration at the end of the war had been insufficiently known at the time. In the parallel study of Ukraine's population losses he was asked by the Mesle and Vallin team to estimate what the population would have been without the 1933 famine and other catastrophes.