Using data from St. Petersburg hospitals on the length and weight of 64,087 infants born between 1980 and 2005 and the physical stature and weight of 15,819 mothers born between 1929 and 1989, we find that women's living standards, as measured by their height, improved steadily from the end of World War II up to 1990, which is when women born in 1972 reached adulthood. For mother cohorts born after 1972 and reaching adulthood in the early and mid-1990s, heights declined. Evidence on both the length and weight of babies corroborates this pattern as there is a noticeable connection between the height and weight of newborns and that of their mothers, on the one hand, and social and demographic indicators, on the other. In our data, we see their values trace a "U" shaped curve with troughs near the mid-1990s. Thus, the anthropometric evidence concerning newborns as well as mothers points to the impact of strains on living standards that were prevalent during the period of economic restructuring of the 1990s. This is a general result that confirms a recurring pattern: periods of economic transitions are almost always accompanied by biological stress. In the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, newborns in Moscow and St. Petersburg were definitely inferior to European and white American newborns in weight and, most likely, in stature as well, as there is a close relationship between stature and weight.