> The despair and famines caused by Stalin, Hitler, Mao all caused far more deaths.

That's true, but if you take the demographic residue, the fall of the USSR is the only time, safe for the worst year of the stalinist purges, to make it dive into the negatives : https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/burckina_faso/26952019/74305...

It's hard to visualize how big of an impact it had on Russian society as a whole.

"Deaths of despair" is a defined term that includes three causes of death: suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease. 1991 was the largest spike in deaths of despair in human history and the whataboutism and borderline Holocaust revisionism of implying Hitler's genocide was primarily drug overdoses, alcoholic liver disease, or suicide (!) is morally abhorrent. You could have just looked up a term you didn't understand rather than rushing to argue, and in the process arguing that Hitler's victims killed themselves.