THE RELIGIOUS CONSULTATION
on population, reproductive health & ethics

The Economist, September 30, 2004

Russia appears to be committing suicide

Death Wish; Russian Demography; The trouble with a shrinking population

DATELINE: Moscow -- IN KEEPING with its propensity to extremes, whereas western Europe has a demographic problem, Russia faces a catastrophe. Its population has fallen by around 3.5m since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Such a slump normally results from mass emigration or war, but Russia has been largely peaceful and a net importer of people. The cause is starker: around 10m more deaths than births since the end of communism.

Russia's birth rate dived at the start of the 1990s. It has since stabilised. But widespread infertility, caused in part by the over-use of abortion and in part by sexually transmitted diseases, will help to make a bounceback unlikely. Many rich countries have comparably low birth rates, though; it is Russia's death rate that is beyond compare. It rocketed in the early 1990s; subsided between 1994 and 1998 "from the catastrophic to the merely gruesome", as Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, puts it; but has since exploded again. Male life expectancy is lower than it was 40 years ago. Fewer than half of 16-year-old Russian boys will reach 60.

Poverty is only part of the explanation. Russian men are dying earlier than in previous times of comparable hardship, and also earlier than other, even poorer people elsewhere, including in former Soviet states. A wanton disregard for their own health is a big factor—especially their high regard for vodka. Russians are among the heaviest drinkers in the world; but it is above all what they drink, and how (mostly in binges), that explains their susceptibility to heart disease, industrial and traffic accidents, and murder and suicide. A Russian man is around ten times as likely to die a violent or accidental death as a British man. But alcoholism is itself just a symptom of the long, dark night of the Russian soul ushered in by the disorienting collapse of communism.

As Mr Eberstadt notes, in so far as Vladimir Putin's government pays heed to the problem (aside from exhortatory footage of the president's judo bouts), it mainly concerns itself with fertility. The Duma is waging a proxy battle with the beer industry: a ban on drinking beer in the streets, a habit of many Muscovites on their way home from work (and of some on their way in), looks imminent. Yet shop-bought vodka remains a bargain, to say nothing of the caustic moonshine that is widely drunk.

How low could Russia's population go? Perhaps to 100m by 2050, or less if the country continues to neglect its AIDS problem. Tuberculosis is rife. Russia's suicidal bent could eventually threaten its disintegration, if its vast, depopulated territory became ungovernable.

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