Murray Feshbach

In his first annual presidential address to the Russian people [July 2000], President Vladimir Putin listed the 16 "most acute problems facing our country." Number one on the list, topping even the country's dire economic condition and the diminishing effectiveness of its political institutions, was the declining size of Russia's population. Putin put the matter plainly. The Russian population is shrinking by 750,000 every year, and (thanks to a large excess of deaths over births) looks likely to continue dropping for years to come. If the trend is not altered, he warned, "the very survival of the nation will be endangered."

• By 2050, I believe, Russia's population will shrink by one-third, from roughly 145 million today to about 100 million, a blow that even a stable, prosperous country would have difficulty sustaining.
• Russian women now bear little more than half the number of children needed to sustain the population at current levels. In absolute terms, the number of annual births has dropped by half since reaching a high of 2.5 million in 1983.
• Attitudes toward childbearing have changed for the worse. An estimated two-thirds of all pregnancies now end in abortions.
• The ranks of eligible parents, especially fathers, are being thinned by tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, alcoholism, drug abuse, and other causes. Fifteen to 20 percent of all Russian families experience infertility.
• Perhaps 40 percent of the nation's hospitals and clinics do not have hot water or sewage.
• Seventy-five percent or more of pregnant women suffer a serious pathology during their pregnancy, such as sepsis, toxemia, or anemia.
• Leading Russian pediatrician Aleksandr Baranov estimates that only five to ten percent of all Russian children are healthy.
• In the United States, a boy who lives to age 16 has an 88 to 90 percent chance of living to age 60. His Russian counterpart has only a 58-60 percent chance. And those chances are shrinking.
• Vadim Pokrovskiy, Russia's leading HIV/AIDS epidemiologist, estimates there will be five to ten million deaths [from AIDS] in the years after 2015. Most of the victims will be 15 to 29 years old, and most will be males.
• The U.S. HIV incidence rate was 16.7 new cases per 100,000 population in 1998. The Baltic port city of Kaliningrad and its surrounding region hold the unhappy distinction of recording the highest official rate of HIV increase [in Russia], at 76.9 new cases per 100,000. Moscow, however, is currently overtaking this rate.
• Sexually transmitted diseases have seen incredible rates of increase during the past decade. The causes can be traced to the explosion of pornography and promiscuity; to the growth of prostitution, notably among 10- to 14-year-old girls; and especially to drug abuse involving shared needles and syringes. In 1997 the Ministry of Internal Affairs estimated that the market for illegal drugs was around $7 billion, 600 times greater than in 1991.
• An estimated 20 million Russians--roughly one-seventh of the population--are alcoholics. Russia's annual death toll from alcohol poisoning alone may have risen to 35,000 in 2000, as compared with 300 in the United States in the late 1990s.
• Smoking is a habit among an estimated 70 percent of Russian males and one-third of females, and multinational tobacco companies aim to increase their sales in the country. The World Health Organization estimates that some 14 percent of all deaths in 1990 in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were traceable to smoking-related illnesses; it expects that number to rise to 22 percent by 2020.
• Last year President Putin abolished Russia's main environmental agency, the State Committee on Environment, and transferred its responsibilities to the Ministry of Natural Resources, which is in the business of developing the country's oil and mineral reserves.
• Seven hundred "major" accidents and spills (defined as those involving 25,000 barrels of oil or more) occur every year in Russia, spreading a variety of toxic chemicals. As Victor Ivanovich Danilov-Danilyan, the former head of the State Committee on Environment, notes, these losses are equivalent to about 25 Exxon Valdez spills per month!
• In Krasnoural'sk, a city in the Urals that produces car batteries, Russian and American researchers have found that 76.5 percent of the children are mentally retarded. Lead is the cause.
• Heart disease exacts a toll, in age-standardized death rates more than twice that in the United States and Western Europe. The death rate from such disease per 100,000 population is currently 736.1 in Russia, 267.7 in Belgium, 317.2 in the United Kingdom, and 307.2 in the United States.

Murray Feshbach, former branch chief at the U.S. Bureau of the Census and research professor at Georgetown University, is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, Washington, DC. He is the author most recently of Ecological Disaster: Cleaning Up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime (1995).

Edited excerpt reprinted with permission from The Wilson Quarterly 25 (Winter 2001): 15-21.

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© 2001 East-West Church and Ministry Report
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