Related. Basically, technology is advancing really fast in recent years. The dissolution of a single communist country at a particular point in time is unrelated to that.

Think the data underpinning this needs investigated. I don’t, by any means, have any sugar-coated ideas of east european ‘actually existing socialism’ but these look dodgy to me.

If it is true then there may be historic factors e.g. death rate associated with WWII or even the public health impact of post-1991 deindustrialisation. These may perhaps explain it (multi variate analysis needed).

On other hand, there’s a lot of strange stuff happens with the way life expectancies are calculated generally (it isn’t how you would expect!) They dont seem to reference pre-1991 data sources so is the basis of calculation the same? Somehow I doubt it.