 Closely related to the declining life expectancy, alcohol-related deaths skyrocketed 60% in the 1990s and deaths from infectious and parasitic diseases shot up 100%, mainly because medicines were no longer affordable to the poor.While Russia no longer suffered from the supply shortages of consumer goods that were so characteristic of the 1980s USSR ("see" Consumer goods in the Soviet Union), this was not only related to the opening of the Russian market to imports in the early 1990s but also to the relative impoverishment of the Russian people in the 1980s.Russians on fixed incomes (the vast majority of the workforce) saw their purchasing power drastically reduced, so while the stores might have been well stocked in the Yeltsin era, average people could now afford to buy little, if anything from these stores.