Russia’s Existential Crisis: No Signs Population Drop Will End
BY Palash R. Ghosh | March 22 2012 10:41 AM
Russia is facing a demographic crisis that threatens its very
existence.
Russia’s Existential Crisis: No Signs Population Drop Will End
In the 20 years since the Soviet Union's dissolution, the new Russia
has ridden a startling economic trajectory, drastically altering the
former communist empire.
But among unexpected developments in post-Soviet Russia, the
phenomenon of a declining population has proven most intractable.
Russia is caught in the grip of a devastating and highly anomalous
peacetime population crisis, wrote Nicholas Eberstadt, an adviser at
the National Bureau of Asian Research, a Washington think tank.
The problems of a falling birth rate and an aging population are
familiar to citizens of western Europe and Japan. But Russia's unique
straddling of Europe and Asia and a tumultuous history that includes
nearly 75 years of communist rule mean explanations for its
demographic calamity are anything but simple.
According to demographer Murray Feshbach, who has spent years
assessing Russia's population loss, and others, the country could have
as few as 72 million inhabitants by 2050. The U.S. population, on the
other hand, could increase to as much as 450 million by then.
Contributing factors to Russia's demographic crisis include low
fertility rates, aging, decreasing life expectancies for males, rising
incidence of heart disease, HIV/AIDS and alcoholism.
Other factors play a role as well. Russia's public health care system
has been ravaged since Soviet days, and there has been little public
effort to improve it, making a reversal of the population unlikely
anytime soon.
Estimates from the Human Mortality Database, maintained by the
University of California, Berkeley, put life expectancy at birth in
Russia lower in 2009 than it was in 1961 -- an otherwise unheard-of
trend in a developed country.
Life expectancy at age 15 for Russians was more than two years below
its level of 50 years earlier.
For young Russian men, life expectancy sank by almost four years in
just over two generations.
The database further shows that although Russian women fare relatively
better than their male compatriots, the mortality rate for working-age
Russian females in 2009 was slightly higher than for working-age women
in Bolivia, South America's poorest nation. In contrast, 20 years ago,
Russia's death rate for working-age women was 45 percent lower than
Bolivia's.
The International Business Times spoke with an demographics expert to
explore Russia's crisis.
P. H. Liotta is the Thomas Hawkins Johnson visiting scholar at the
U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. His latest book is The Real
Population Bomb: Megacities, Global Security and the Map of the
Future.
Liotta told IBT that the crisis has become so much a part of the human
landscape today that this reality of a vanishing Russia is just taken
as a hard reality that Russians must live with.
IBT: What, if anything, has Vladimir Putin's regime done to deal with
falling birth rates? Has he discussed the demographic crisis openly?
LIOTTA: When Putin first became president, his first address to the
National Assembly [both houses of parliament] zeroed in on Russia's
demographic challenge as its greatest national security threat. He has
never essentially spoken of it since -- as if the issue is too
difficult to speak of, because it may prove too impossible to solve.
IBT: Does Russia now have a negative population growth rate? If so,
how did this happen and when did Russia turn the corner?
LIOTTA: The truth of a shrinking Russia is harsh. At the end of World
War II, Russia had a population of 100 million, the U.S. 150
million. In 1960, Russia had a population of 120 million. In 2002,
Pakistan exceeded Russia's falling population of roughly 145
million. (By contrast, in 2000, the United States' population was 286
million.)
IBT: Do you expect Russia's population to keep declining?
LIOTTA: Yes. We should expect to see between a quarter and as much as
a third of Russia's current population simply vanish in the next 35
years -- a loss of more than 30 million people.
Notably, Ukraine's population decline will be worse, where we will
definitely see a loss of a third of its population during the same
time-frame.
There is another problem Russia has as well. Its population is
aging. Russians age 65 or older will comprise 20 percent of the
population a decade from now.
IBT: Are life expectancy rates in Russia much lower than in Western
Europe?
LIOTTA: Yes, by about a decade. In very rough terms, since life
expectancies vary widely by states, life expectancies for western
Europe are 77 years, for Russia they 67 years.
IBT: Women in Russia live much longer than men. Why is this? How does
this affect birth and growth rates?
LIOTTA: Russian males have put themselves in a death spiral. Though
estimates may vary for the average male's life expectancy -- from 54
to 59 years -- the life expectancy for Russian women is 72 years.
It seems a cliché but it's true: Russian males' fondness for vodka and
unhealthy lifestyles only fuels the tendency toward lower and lower
life expectancies. It is a cruel irony to realize that the life
expectancy for a Russian male today is lower than it was during the
feudal period under the tsar.
This disparity obviously does affect birth and growth rates. But there
are deeper sociological factors and I would prefer to give a more
personal answer here, based on direct observation and multiple travels
throughout Russia -- especially Siberia.
The family unit -- mother, father and children -- simply appears to be
broken. Outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg (and not even frequently
there), I never saw the family unit in existence. Mothers were with
their children, of course, and often grandparents joined in family
celebrations, but I never saw fathers in attendance.
Males were elsewhere -- at bars, strip clubs, casinos, otherwise
occupied.
IBT: HIV/AIDS is apparently a huge problem in Russia. Has this emerged
due to massive drug abuse? How has this affected the birth rate?
LIOTTA: Aside from Central Asia (which contains several former Soviet
republics); Russia has the fastest-growing HIV/AIDS rate in the
world. Eighty percent of all those infected are under the age of
30. Moreover, some Russian officials have made the alarmist claim that
50 percent of the Russian population could be HIV-positive by the end
of the decade.
To date, less than 5 percent of the cost necessary to combat HIV/AIDs
has been spent in the public health care system. After the breakup of
the Soviet Union and the formation of the independent Soviet states,
HIV/AIDS was definitely a low priority.
In addition, Russian medical professionals had almost no training in
the recognition and treatment of the viral disease and related
illnesses.
While prevailing thought suggests HIV/AIDs is a disease of the
homeless and drug abusers, statistics do not bear this out. HIV/AIDS
continues to grow throughout the Russian population. This makes the
overall picture for Russia's vanishing act all the more frightening.
As many as 2 percent of Russians, for example, are intravenous drug
users. Because of repressive controls and a non-supportive health care
system, possession of needles and syringes are illegal.
Thus, 40 percent of IVDUs share the needles and syringes they have --
and the disease spreads like wildfire. Twenty-five percent of all
IVDUs in Russia are HIV-positive; 80 percent of those infected are
under the age of 30.
Another sad reality is that, in Russia, the risk of HIV transmission
by blood transfusion still very much exists. While this type of risk
may have been all but eliminated in the West, in Russia -- largely due
to often-unnecessary blood transfusions -- [the country] had the
highest HIV rate for children in Europe.
IBT: Russia has a problem with illegal immigrants from southern parts
of the former Soviet Union, as well as Central Asia. Does Moscow allow
for legal immigration -- and are there enough immigrants in the nation
to prevent a serious decline in the birth rate?
LIOTTA: The one saving feature, if we could use this term, is that
Russia remains a country of positive migration -- taking in more
immigrants than émigrés. The simple explanation for this is that the
former Soviet Union now comprises 17 different states -- and
post-Soviet life has not gone well for many citizens, especially in
Central Asia. Russia remains a place to come to.
Russia needs to seriously reform its immigration policy (as do many
other nations, including the U.S.). Moscow alone may be officially a
city of 10 million residents, but its illegal immigrants account for
several million more.
Even allowing for legal immigration, nonetheless, this will not
accommodate for nor fill the gap in Russia's negative population
growth.
IBT: Throughout the 20th century, Russia suffered horrific losses of
life -- from war, starvation, famine and exterminations. Could these
precedents have had a long-term negative impact on the population
growth rate?
LIOTTA: Russia, in particular, suffered horrific losses coming out of
the Second World War. Demographically, her problem resembles the
dilemma Europe will face over the coming decades. In Europe, with a
replacement fertility rate of 1.75 (where population replacement rate
must exceed 2.1), 80 million fewer Europeans will exist over the next
decades -- a decline greater than the Black Death of the 14th century.
Russia's problem, nonetheless, is even more complex than that of
Europe.
IBT: If Russia's population keeps declining, will it gradually lose
its political and military power and become weak and feeble?
LIOTTA: There is an easy, rather chilling, formula to remember what
has been going on in Russia for decades: There are three burials for
every two births. The combination of HIV/AIDs-infected youth,
decreasing life expectancies for males and an overall aging population
cumulatively result in a decreasing work force and population. This
trend is in the pipeline and cannot be reversed in the short-term --
and will have a significant economic impact by 2020.
One could argue that a Russia with fewer people means a leaner, meaner
state, but Russia is literally vanishing in eastern Siberia, making
the region quite tempting for China. Too few people without enough
immigrants for replacement labor could seriously affect Russia's
future power.
http://www.ibtimes.com/russias-existent ... end-214342