Wanted: more Russian babies to rescue a fast dying nation
Amelia Gentleman in Moscow reports on a critical decline in population from harsh living standards and poor medical services - prompting extreme nationalists to advocate polygamy
Sunday December 31, 2000
Russia's eccentric ultra-nationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, has come up with a novel solution to the country's demographic crisis - polygamy.
The leader of the extreme-right Liberal Democratic Party recently proposed that the family code be amended to allow men to take up to five wives. More wives, according to his logic, would mean more babies, and thus boost the shrinking population.
After a brief debate in Parliament, his scheme was dismissed as inappropriate. But as the government takes stock of its challenges for the new year, attention will be concentrated on finding less idiosyncratic answers to a problem likely to worsen over the next decade,
threatening the economic recovery and development of Russia.
While a young, energetic workforce is needed to revitalise struggling industry, agriculture and businesses, Russians are dying out faster than at any time since the Second World War, according to statistics released this month. The population has shrunk by 3.3 million since the Soviet
Union's collapse to about 145 million - an unprecedented decline for an industrialised nation in peacetime. The State Statistics Committee, Goskomstat, forecasts the population will fall by a further 11 million
over the next 15 years. More pessimistic analysts - including President Vladimir Putin - suggest it could drop to 123 million by 2015.
'If you believe the forecasts, made by serious people who have devoted their whole lives to studying this question, in 15 years' time there could be 22 million fewer Russians. Just think about that figure - it's a seventh of the country's population,' Putin warned recently.
In the first 10 months of this year alone, the nation lost 550,600 people - as if a small regional capital had been obliterated.
The phenomenon has been named the 'Russian Cross' by demographers - a reference to a soaring mortality rate set on a graph against a plummeting birth rate.
The shorter lifespan is partly the product of a health service in crisis - the disappearance of universal free access to high-quality health care, the collapse of national immunisation programmes and the dire funding
problems in regional clinics.
Sociologists cite worsening living standards and stresses prompted by a decade of transition and economic depression as key causes of premature death in men. The stresses have led to chronic abuse of vodka and cigarettes, the main killers of Russian males.
Russia's birth rate has done nothing to compensate for the dying population. Women are now expected to bear 1.17 children, down from 1.89 in 1990. Pregnancy and childbirth is 10 times more dangerous than it is in Germany.
With around a third of the population living below the official poverty line (receiving monthly salaries that are under the official subsistence level of £30 a month), women are very conscious of the expense of rearing children, and many choose to delay giving birth or opt against it
completely.
Two pregnancies are terminated for every child born, with abortion remaining a key form of birth control. Infant mortality has improved, but last year it was still 15.8 deaths per 1,000 births, far higher than the US's 6.9 per 1,000.
Anatoly Sudoplatov, of the demographics faculty at Moscow University, said depopulation would have a profound impact on the economy. 'These demographic trends block any attempt to raise the standard of living in Russia, because the government has to allocate such large sums of money
to look after an ageing and sick population,' he said.
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