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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Farewell Russia |
| 2004-10-10 |
| Russians are dying in numbers and at ages that seem impossible to believe. Heart disease, alcohol consumption, and tuberculosis are epidemic. So is addiction to nicotine. You won't see many pregnant women on the streets; Russia has one of the lowest peacetime birth rates in modern history.Long life is one of the central characteristics of an advanced society; in Russia, men often die too young to collect a pension. In the United States, even during the Great Depression mortality rates continued to drop, and the same has been true for all other developed countries. Except Russia. In the past decade, life expectancy has fallen so drastically that a boy born in Russia today can expect to live just to the age of fifty-eight, younger than if he were born in Bangladesh. No other educated, industrialized nation ever has suffered such a prolonged, catastrophic growth in death rates. In 1991, on the day the Soviet Union was dissolved, Russia's population stood at a hundred and forty-nine million. Without the huge wave of immigration from the former Soviet republics which followed, the country would have lost nearly a million people each year since then. If Russia is lucky, by 2050 the population will have fallen by only a third, to a hundred million. That is the most optimistic government scenario. More realistic predictions suggest that the number will be closer to seventy-five or eighty million—a little more than half the current population. |
| Posted by:RWV |
| #3 Russia will likely devolve into a much smaller, Europeanized, reasonably well-governed and demographically stable western-oriented state with only a loose attachment to a set of de facto Chinese puppet regimes covering the Far East and the Siberian regions north and east of Novosibirsk. Russia will never be both democratic and geographically vast. A smaller Russian Federation would allow for a better-governed, more democratic Russian entity stretching roughly from St Petersburg to Novosibirsk. |
| Posted by: lex 2004-10-11 11:48:30 AM |
| #2 The demographic collapse west of the Urals is a major source of current and especially future instability. Add in massive industrial pollution in many parts of the country (with associated birth defects) and a rising Aids crisis. It's not hard to imagine that the trend some see towards autocracy will accelerate over the next decade or so. I hope not, but ... Oh yes, the fastest rising demographic, east of the Urals, is ethnic Chinese. |
| Posted by: rkb 2004-10-10 10:25:42 PM |
| #1 I guess that means everyone will get a bigger apartment, and the country will make billions from the sale of carbon credits under the Kyoto Treaty. Almost as profitable as oil, and no effort to get it out from the ground. /shallow shortsightedness So, the Chinese will continue settling population in the border areas, and lots of them will be thrilled to get older Russians as wives. And in the end the Russian oil fields will fulfill Chinese needs rather than Europe's, while the children will have an adorable mixture of Slavic and Oriental characteristics. Hmmm.... |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2004-10-10 8:56:30 PM |