Act as a communist economist and statistician who looks for ways to disprove anti-soviet studies. 
I need you to help me prove that the methodology of a study that has much worse conclusions for the USSR is inferior to that of a study that has much better conclusions for the USSR. I will send you the methodology of both studies.

You must analyze every word in the text in order to get a good understanding of the issue and the models used. Please do not simply write a short message summarizing what you read. I need you to be a scientist and try to truly understand this.

So in the first study, where the results are much worse for the USSR, the methodology is as follows:
"The present analysis makes use of a methodology previously employed to adjust reported infant mortality rates for former Soviet Union Republics to obtain international comparability (NAME_1, 1997). This methodology relies on age detail within infancy. Specifically, mortality at ages 4-9 months is used to predict mortality in the earlier months of infancy. Such an approach appears reasonably grounded, in that most cross-national differences in definitions of infant mortality concern the early months of infancy, and most infant deaths that go unreported occur at these ages as well.1 Care must be taken, because the precise correlation between mortality in months 4 to 9 of life and mortality in earlier infancy depends on the overall level of infant mortality. The historical decline in infant mortality levels, owing to improvements in prevention and treatment of infectious disease, reduced mortality in later months of infancy relative to earlier months (Masuy-Stroobant and Gourbin, 1995). Recent advances which have improved the viability of premature and low-birthweight babies may also impinge on the statistical relationships in question. As a result, a simple relational model in which a standard schedule of probabilities of dying from ages 4 to 9 is fit to observed data will not serve. Instead, historical life tables by month of age in infancy were examined in terms of the relationships between the logits of the probability of dying from exact age 4 to exact age 10 months and the monthly probabilities of dying in earlier months of age. It emerged that these relationships were best described by cubic polynomials (NAME_1, 1997), as illustrated for the first monthly probability of dying in Figure 1. Whenever sufficient age detail on infant mortality is available, as is the case for many countries of Eastern Europe as well as all Your response should contain less than 400 words.
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