Russia is a huge nation. It is about 75% bigger than U.S. or twice bigger than Brazil. But its population is just 142 million people. On the other hand, U.S. reached 300 million people a few weeks ago and the population of Brazil is approaching to 190 million.
This is not all. United States gains about 3 million people per year; Brazil, 2 million. Russia loses about 800 thousand people.
China is the most populated country of Asia. Russia is the most populated country of Europe. The population of China multiplies by more than 9 the population of Russia. And China gains almost 8 million people per year. So, the chinatization of the Russian Far East is a reality nowadays.
This is not all. The russian population in the Caucasus has fallen drastically the last 15 years while the muslim population grows fast.
About 50 years ago the population of Pakistan was about 40% of the population of Russia. Today it is about 12% higher.
The life expectancy for the russain man is about 59 years. Although the russian economy has grown fast the last years the fact is the social development has not advanced as much as the economic one.
This is not all, Moscow has become the most expensive city of the world.
Sad. The economic reform in the land of Yuri Gagarin has not been as successful as in Hungary or the Czech Republic.
5 users commented in " The death of Russia? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackOh, blah, blah. Why is it that the news media in the West has this fascination with seeking Russian “weaknesses”, coming up with gloomy scenarios, and like born-again Christians predicting Judgement Day, incessantly coming up with prophecies of a Russian collapse? And why do they zoom in and hark on every negative aspect while belittling or ignoring any positive trend?
Yes, the population decline is a problem. Putin said as much in his State of the Union address. He named it the #1 problem in fact. Yet this is not an insolvable problem. Russia is taking the first steps on the “population increase” side, trying to come up with policies to increase the birth rate, and immigration. While xenophobia is a problem on the second front, an education campaign could resolve this issue if ever the authorities get serious about it. On the “population decrease” side, investments are finally being made on the health care system, long overdue after more than a decade of neglect. Eventually the mortality rate should go down.
It is funny that you give Hungary as a counter-example to Russia. Hungary, the country where it was discovered that the government lied about the true state of the economy to dupe the electorate into reelecting it. A country with a 10% budget deficit, a country with one of the lowest GDP growths in Europe, and in danger of an economic collapse.
Let me give some other statistics: Your absolute figures are misleading. Yes, Russia’s population is declining by about 700000 a year. If we look at the impact on the population base, this signifies a yearly 0.5% population decline. Let’s now compare to other countries: Ukraine is losing 350000 people every year. However, while Russia has 140+ million people, Ukraine only has 47 million. This means that Ukraine is experiencing a 0.75% population decline. Bulgaria is declining at 0.9% yearly, and God knows how many people will flee to Western Europe when they join the EU in 2007. In the past 2 years, Poland has lost over 1 million people to the UK and Ireland. Since Poland’s population is 39 million, a loss of 500000 people a year signifies 1.3% yearly decline. And people are still headed for the exits.
Then your selective use of statistics. You harp on the life expentancy of Russian men, a deplorable 59. But you don’t even mention that the life expentancy of Russian women is a respectable 71. Muslim populations growing faster than Christian populations is not a Russian problem. This is the same in every other part of Europe. In fact, Albania has the fastest growing population in Europe. As far as the “chinatization” of the Russian Far East, this is plain alarmism. Yes, Chinese have been crossing the border. So? Mexicans cross the border in bigger numbers to the US. In the end, they contribute to the economy, and become an asset.
Russia’s economy is set to grow at 7% this year, one of the fastest in Europe outside of the Baltics. While many commentators in the Western press like to fill newspapers about how this growth is only due to oil, this is a lie. The lie can be clearly shown by the fact that the oil and gas industries have been growing very slowly these past couple of years, since the government started its “consolidation” of the industry. Growth is coming from dynamic sectors of the economy such as services and construction. The communications industry is growing in leaps and bounds, the IT industry has reached $1 billion a year from a few million 5 years ago. Nothing compared to the $30 billion IT industry of India, but the growth is astounding, its size increasing every year. Auto manufacturers are falling over each other to set up plants in Russia, and bankers are rushing to establish branches or form partnerships with Russian banks. The aircraft and defence industry are finally showing signs of life after a long period of decline. The nuclear industry is being revived, with ambitious plans to build 2 nuclear plants a year over the next 20 years.
Commentaries about Russia in the Western press need to find balance. Almost every article is permeated by Russophobia, which takes different manifestations: Either shrilly denouncing some policy of the Russian government, gloating over real or perceived Russian setbacks, or reveling in flimsy prophesies of a Russian debacle.
Thor’s-hammer-123, very well put, my friend. A commendable response.
I simply seethe with indignation every time I read an article that deals directly or indirectly with some aspect of Russian life. The malice and hatred are all too obvious, with little if any attempt to conceal it. There’s very little integrity left in journalism, and most writers spill their biased bigoted russophobic opinions that are simply a waste of one’s time to read and comment on. It was somewhat encouraging to read your post and realize that I’m not the only one disgusted with Western media’s obvious agenda to vilify Russia in any and every way. Thanks for a very objective summary.
Incidentally, if it weren’t for Latino immigration to U.S., along with immigration from pretty much all other parts of the world, population in America would be on a decline as well. Same goes for Europe. It’s a rule: as a nation develops economically and becomes prosperous, its citizens are less prone to have children, and more inclined to have cats and dogs for subjects of their love and affection. Hence in another 50 years most of Europe will be comprised of people of Arabic descent, whereupon in America Hispanics will probably be the majority.
So, Charlsey_bd, if you analyze Russia’s demographic issues in the context of numbers AND ethnic/religious makeup, be kind enough to do exactly the same for ALL countries you mentioned in your illustrious comparisons aimed at belittling and gloomifying (it’s a word now) Russia.
Great response, I have to aknowledge that but behind the rosy picture of economic revival and improvement of life you forgot to speak about freedoms of russian people. Freedom is part of economic greatness. The level of corruption in russia is so high that economi revival will turn into economic illusion very soon.
O, here’s some more:
Once-mighty Russia fades to a dying population
By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times | October 15, 2006
KSTINOVO, Russia — Welcome to Kstinovo, population 1 .
Antonina Makarova, 78, spends her days watching news and soap operas in her peeling wooden dacha, the only inhabited structure in two lanes of sagging cottages that once were a village. Her nearest neighbor, 80-year-old Maria Belkova, lives in adjacent Sosnovitsy, population 2. But Belkova can’t hear anymore, and all in all, Makarova finds the television better company.
“All the houses here were filled with people. There was a cheese factory. But now everyone else has died. God has taken care of them, and he’s still making me suffer,” Makarova said. “Even the thieves have disappeared.”
The Tver region, along the upper reaches of the Volga River 130 miles north of Moscow, is dotted with more than 1,400 villages such as Kstinovo marked “nezhiloye” — depopulated. Since 1989, the number of people here has shrunk by about 250,000 to about 1.4 million, with deaths outnumbering births more than 2 to 1.
The Tver region is far from unusual in this country.
Russia is the only major industrial nation that is losing population. Its people are succumbing to one of the world’s fastest-growing AIDS epidemics, resurgent tuberculosis, rampant cardiovascular disease, alcohol and drug abuse, smoking, suicide, and the lethal effects of unchecked industrial pollution.
In addition, abortions outpaced births last year by more than 100,000. An estimated 10 million Russians of reproductive age are sterile because of botched abortions or poor health. The public healthcare system is collapsing. And many parents in more prosperous urban areas say they can’t afford homes large enough for the number of children they would like to have.
The former Soviet Union, with about 300 million people, was the world’s third-most populous country, behind China and India. Slightly more than half of its citizens lived in Russia. The country has lost the equivalent of a city of 700,000 people every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, only partially offset by an influx of people from other former Soviet republics. A country that sprawls across one-eighth of the globe is now home to 142 million people.
The losses have been disproportionately male. At the height of the power of the Soviet Union, its people lived almost as long as Americans. But now, the average Russian man can expect to live about 59 years, 16 years less than an American man and 14 less than a Russian woman.
Sergei Mironov, chairman of the upper house of Russia’s parliament, said last year that if the trend didn’t change, the population would fall to 52 million by 2080. “There will no longer be a great Russia,” he said. “It will be torn apart piece by piece, and finally cease to exist.”
That may be an overstatement, but there are serious questions about whether Russia will be able to hold on to its far eastern lands along the border with China over the next century or field an army, let alone a workforce to support the ill and the elderly.
Russian officials, flush with revenue from record prices for the country’s oil exports, have started to respond. President Vladimir V. Putin pledged payments this year of $111 a month to mothers who choose to have a second child, plus a nest egg of $9,260 to be used for education, a mortgage, or pensions. He also called for renewed efforts to attract ethnic Russians living in the ex-Soviet republics.
“Russia has a huge territory, the largest territory in the world,” Putin said. “If the situation remains unchanged, there will simply be no one to protect it.”
The economic earthquake of Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism plunged tens of millions into poverty overnight and changed the value systems upon which many had planned their lives.
A small minority, mostly in urban centers such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, were able to exploit the absence of rules in the chaotic 1990s to become fabulously wealthy. But such a profound social transition, coming at the end of a century of war, revolution, and ruthless social experimentation, condemned a great many more to a deep malaise.
Those who lost out have proved susceptible to drinking, smoking, and other habits that killed millions of Russians even in the best of times. In more extreme cases, they kill themselves.
Russia’s suicide rate, at about 36 per 100,000 people, is second only to that of Lithuania, according to the Serbsky National Research Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry. In some remote areas of Russia, the rate exceeds 100 per 100,000.
Some say the cause of Russia’s problems can be found in communism’s willful destruction of generations of the country’s most capable and adaptable people.
“Seventy-five years of Bolshevik life in this country led to the formation of a tribe of people which was cultivated to listen to orders, and fulfill them,” said Alexander Gorelik, a St. Petersburg physician. Stalinism, he said, aimed for “the planned and gradual physical destruction of the most moral, the most creative group of the population.”
“There is such a thing as a will for life,” he said. “And the whole trouble is that the Russian public in general, and especially the male population, has a big deficiency in this area.”
Russia has a long history of alcohol abuse. Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev tried to tackle the problem 20 years ago by limiting the production and distribution of liquor. When he did, male life expectancy increased three years.
But massive drinking resumed when the controls were eased. The average Russian drinks 5 gallons of pure alcohol a year, causing an estimated 900,000 deaths over the past decade through acute alcohol poisoning, fights, and accidents, according to figures released by Tatyana Yakovleva, head of the Russian parliament’s healthcare committee, at a recent conference in Moscow. Others have permanent brain damage or liver damage from homemade alcohol.
It has been five years since Svetlana Glukhova was diagnosed as HIV-positive, but she says she still has no idea whether she needs drug therapy. Doctors at the only AIDS center in her city do not have the necessary laboratory equipment to decide that.
She does know that even when she took her first AIDS test, the sores on the fingers she once used to inject heroin already were failing to heal.
The United Nations says Russia has the worst AIDS problem in Europe, fueled by “extraordinarily large numbers of young people who inject drugs.” But the disease has spread widely through the population, and more than half of all new cases result from heterosexual intercourse. Officially, 340,000 Russians are infected with HIV or AIDS, but the UN says the number could easily be four to 10 times higher.
Compounding the problem, most Russian victims are young. The prevalence of the illness among young people threatens to add to Russia’s demographic meltdown by killing them before they can bring a new generation into the world.
I hope that very soon the evil empire by the name of russia will cease to exist.
Leave A Reply