Associates, and also appears akin to the methodology sketched by Andreyev and Ksenofontova (1991). Our current approach remains in this tradition, but differs in its particulars from our previous practice.

For the 6 excluded republics, the data files delivered to us contained severe formatting errors that render them unusable for any analysis.

These life expectancies were calculated with the adjusted infant mortality rates from Table 51 and are lower than Goskomstat's official life expectancies for the given republics and dates.

The male mortality rates in infancy and childhood reported for the rural population of Azerbaijan exceed the rates reported for the urban population. With advancing age, the urban mortality rates increase in greater measure than the rural rates, so that by the early 30s, the urban rates exceed the corresponding rural rates; this situation persists over the remainder of the age range. Thanks to the rural-urban fertility differential, the proportions urban in Azerbaijan's population increase with age, so that the national average mortality schedule weights the rural and urban subdivisions most heavily at precisely the ages at which their mortality rates exceed those of their counterparts. In turn, this leads to the life expectancies shown in Table 5-2.

Azerbaijan has the distinction of being the homeland of the oldest purported centenarians in the former Soviet Union, who have been a subject of perennial interest to ethnographers, gerontologists, and others. In the 1980s, a group from the Institute of Ethnography of the Soviet Academy of Sciences set out to interview the alleged centenarians in the villages where they resided. They came away concluding that the individuals in question were nowhere near the age they claimed to be, and published a monograph containing their findings (Kozlov, 1989).

The exceptions are of negligible magnitude, amounting at most to 6 percent of a year of life lost.