The USSR failed to develop a modern pharmaceutical industry and was dependent on imports from eastern Europe and South Asia. As a consequence, many ineffective treatments that had either never been adopted or had long been abandoned in the West remained routine and innovations developed in the west were not adopted. The consequences can be seen from the way that rates of avoidable mortality, or deaths that should not occur in the presence of timely and effective care, remained high in Russia from the late 1960s onwards at a time when they were falling steadily in the west.