Russia Wanes

At the beginning of 1992, Russia was home to 149 million people. Over the next 12 years, it added a net of 5½ million immigrants. Today its population stands at 144 million, with 160 deaths for every 100 births. Writing in the Winter 2005 issue of The Public Interest [Warning: ephemeral link], Nicholas Eberstadt sees no likelihood of an uptick.

Despite the mitigating impact of immigration, Russia’s post-Communist population decline was larger in absolute terms than any other country’s over the past decade. Furthermore, continuing population decline – at a decidedly faster tempo – is envisioned for Russia as far as demographers care to project into the future. The only question is how steep the downward path will be. The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, offers the relatively optimistic projection of a “mere” 14 million person drop in Russia’s population between 2000 and 2025 – an average net decline of about 560,000 persons a year. The U.N. Population Division’s (UNPD) “medium variant” projection, by contrast, suggests a drop of more than 21 million over the same quarter century – about 840,000 persons a year for the period as a whole.

As the influx of ethnic Russians from the “Near Abroad” reaches its end (net immigration today is barely above zero), there is no counter to depopulation. The birth rate is a full one child per woman below the replacement ratio. A conservative estimate is that at least one-seventh of Russian couples are infertile. More pessimistic observers believe that sterility afflicts one-third of adults. The intractable causes of this widespread inability to reproduce are abortion and venereal disease. Abortion, “conducted under the less-than-exemplary standards of Soviet and post-Soviet medicine”, has long been the primary form of birth control, while the syphilis infection rate is 100 times that of Germany (which itself has one of the higher rates in Western Europe). As many as two million Russians may be HIV-infected. “One recent survey in St. Petersburg calculated that 15 percent of the college students questioned had at least one sexually transmitted disease.”

Even if the population could sustain itself, it is not clear that it would choose to do so. Marriage rates have been in precipitous decline, while divorce – not rare in Soviet days – has risen sharply. Russia now has a worse marriage-divorce ratio than the Scandinavian countries, and the Russian government, unlike its Nordic counterparts, cannot afford generous welfare benefits for single parents.

On the other side of the equation,

Over the four-plus decades between 1961-62 and 2003, life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by nearly five years for males; it also declined for females, although just slightly, making for an overall drop in life expectancy of nearly three years. . . . Age-standardized mortality tables cast an even grimmer light on Russia’s continuing health crisis: Between the mid 1960s and the start of the twenty-first century, these rates underwent a long and uneven rise, climbing by over 15 percent for women and over 40 percent for men.

Russia’s upswing in mortality was especially concentrated among its working-age population, and here the upsurge in death rates was utterly breathtaking. Over the three decades between 1970-71 and 2001, for example, every female cohort between the ages of 20 and 59 suffered at least a 30 percent increase in death rates; for men between ages 40 and 59, the corresponding figures uniformly reached, and in some cases exceeded, 60 percent.

A 20-year-old Russian has less than a 50/50 chance of reaching age 65 (compared to 80 percent for an American). According to U.S. Census Bureau projections, “life expectancy of Russian men over the coming two decades will approximate the levels for their counterparts in Bangladesh and Pakistan – and will remain steadily below the levels anticipated for India”. “Yet,” Mr. Eberstadt comments, “somber as these readings appear, they may nevertheless prove excessively optimistic.”

Comparing the mortality schedules of successive birth cohorts in Russia places the problem of “negative health momentum” in even clearer perspective. In industrialized Western societies in the postwar era, younger generations have come routinely to enjoy better survival rates than their predecessors. . . . By contrast, there has been no improvement in survival schedules for rising birth cohorts among the two generations of Russian men born between the late 1920s and the later 1980s. Quite the opposite: Over its life course, each rising cohort of Russian men seems to be charting out a more dismal mortality trajectory than the one traced by its immediate predecessors.

Mr. Eberstadt is surprised that these dire trends have provoked hardly any backlash against the government, which has paid little attention to the decline in the birth rate and none at all to the rise in preventable deaths.

Moscow’s feckless approach to its ongoing national health emergency would be regarded as a scandal in most foreign quarters. But to Western eyes it also constitutes something of a mystery. How is it possible that such a manifestly inadequate health regimen is tolerated in a still somewhat open and pluralistic political system?

He has no answer except “lack of perceived political concern by the public at large”, which is simply another way to phrase the mystery. But perhaps he underestimates the ability of politicians to find indirect ways to deflect embarrassing issues.

From the point of view of individual self-interest, narrowly conceived, average Russians have little reason to feel personal angst over depopulation. Their own choices to act selfishly – to marry later and less permanently, to engage in risky sexual conduct, to eat, drink and smoke too much – are largely to blame for the phenomenon. What we see as a public health crisis, the “victims” may regard as an explosion of freedom. They’ll be sorry when they suffer heart attacks or die of AIDS, but then they’ll be dead and in no position to complain effectively about “Moscow’s feckless approach”.

The one aspect of the crisis that might catch the voting public’s eye is its impact on Russia’s standing as a would-be great power. As its population falls, the collapse of the (partly illusory) superpower pretensions of the Soviet era becomes more and more evident. As a palliative, Moscow tries to maintain its influence over a larger region and to lead public opinion to believe that a “greater Russia” of over 200 million souls, including Ukraine and Belarus, maintains a palpable, if not de jure, existence. That is one reason why President Putin put so much money and prestige into this year’s Ukrainian election. As a substantive matter, who rules in Kiev is of little concern to Russia; economics guarantees that no Ukrainian regime will be hostile. As a matter of form, however, it is vital that Moscow appear to dominate. Otherwise, it cannot go on pretending to be more than a middling power, on a par with, say, Brazil.

Thus the population implosion makes Russia weaker but more assertive and hence more of a headache for the West at a time when we do not need distractions. All that I can think of as a remedy is benign neglect, which is an easier policy to adumbrate than to carry out.

A question of great interest is why the contemporary Russian pathologies have arisen. Here, too, Mr. Eberstadt says little. Pro-communist diehards may feel a certain glee, blaming Capitalism for having upset a tolerable equilibrium. That explanation has is appealingly ironic: Who would have thought that the day would arrive when the apostles of the Workers’ Revolution would praise their system for its stagnation?

If Marxist theory were correct, seven decades of Soviet rule should have made appreciable progress toward molding a new human psyche, one free of the contradictions and flaws of pre-communist man. Instead it seems to have broken down all restraints on egoism and self-gratification. Western libertarians may wish to ponder what happens when a society destroys traditional morality and tries to rebuild on a foundation of nothing but power and self-interest.

Comments

[Jeff Licquia]

More permanent link here.

[Lynxx Pherrett]

You can download Eberstadt's complete analysis, "The Russian Federation at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century: Trapped in a Demographic Straitjacket," in this 247kB PDF from The National Bureau of Asian Research. That may be a more permanent link, and the paper includes 18 pages of charts.