04.19.2009
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 | Super Moderator | | Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: North Carolina Age: 38
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 The Incredible Shrinking Russia
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April 19, 2009
The Incredible Shrinking Russia
WASHINGTON -- America's "progressive" president has some peculiarly retro policies. Domestically, his reactionary liberalism is exemplified by his policy of No Auto Company Left Behind, with its intimated hope that depopulated Detroit, where cattle could graze, can somehow return to something like the 1950s. Abroad, he seems to yearn for the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was rampant and coping with it supposedly depended on arms control.
The Soviet Union was a third-world nation with first-world missiles. It had, as Russia still has, an essentially hunter-gatherer economy, based on extraction industries -- oil, gas, minerals, furs. Other than vodka, for what manufactured good would you look to Russia?
Putin -- ignore the human Potemkin village (Dmitry Medvedev) who currently occupies the presidential office -- must be amazed and amused that America's president wants to treat Russia as a great power. Obama should instead study pertinent demographic trends.
Nicholas Eberstadt's essay "Drunken Nation" in the current World Affairs quarterly notes that Russia is experiencing "a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation." Previous episodes of depopulation -- 1917-23, 1933-34, 1941-46 -- were the results of civil war, Stalin's war on the "kulaks" and collectivization of agriculture, and World War II, respectively. But today's depopulation is occurring in normal -- for Russia -- social and political circumstances. Normal conditions include a subreplacement fertility rate, sharply declining enrollment rates.
Furthermore, "mind-numbing, stupefying binge drinking of hard spirits" -- including poisonously impure home brews -- "is an accepted norm in Russia and greatly increases the danger of fatal injury through falls, traffic accidents, violent confrontations, homicide, suicide, and so on." Male life expectancy is lower under Putin than it was a half-century ago under Khrushchev.
Because of rampant HIV/AIDS, extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) and alcoholism, and the deteriorating health care system, a U.N. report says "mortality in Russia is three to five times higher for men and twice as high for women" than in other countries at a comparable stage of development. The report, Walker says, "predicts that within little more than a decade the working-age population will be shrinking by up to 1 million people annually." Be that as it may, "Russia is suffering a demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the effects of a major war."
According to projections by the United Nations Population Division, Russia's population, which was around 143 million four years ago, might be as high as 136 million or as low as 121 million in 2025, and as low as 115 million in 2030.
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