Fewer births and higher mortality rates since 1992 have brought major
demographic change to Russia and cut the population of the world's largest
nation by 2.8 million people in just a decade. The figures are those of
United Nations Development Program (UNDP) officials charting worrying change
from their Moscow office. Alarming rates of HIV/AIDS infection and cases
of TB doubling over the same time period suggest continuing wide-ranging
consequences for what the experts monitoring movement call "sustainable
human development."
Record decline in Russia's population is a grim concoction of continuing
population aging, falling fertility levels, rising mortality and dwindling
net migration gain, says a UNDP National Human Development Report.
It's no surprise, then, that the demographic time bomb is exercising
the best of brains in Russia, charting how the challenge can be addressed,
or even reversed.
No less auspicious an organization than the Center of Demography and
Ecology of Man at the Institute of Economic Forecasting of the Russian
Academy of Sciences has now even published what was said to be a United
Nations prediction that Russia's population could either grow to 152 million
or drop to 100 million by the year 2050.
Pulling out of the steep decline needs vast improvements in the nation's
health and a baby boom in big numbers. But moving forward could also be
helped, President Vladimir Putin evidently believes, by adopting the United
States' successful immigration policy.
A year ago in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, the head of state said
that with immigration "we have an ideal opportunity for drawing labor resources
from the expanses of the former USSR." It's unclear how far government
has progressed with a program to repatriate millions of Russians among
the diaspora of the Former Soviet Union.
And there is no challenge to the contention that higher birth rates
are the key to the issue. Experts have been quoted as saying three million
births a year are needed, compared to less than 1.3 million a year in the
last three years. Deaths must be held to less than two million a year,
they say.
The likelihood just now is that the pessimistic forecasters will be
proved more accurate, for there is a nation full of lost souls to replace.
Statistics from the Russian Academy of Sciences demography center show
that Russia's human losses in the 20th century total some 100 million people.
These were victims of the Second World War, the October Revolution, Civil
War, purges, repressions and reprisals, famine in the Volga and the Ukraine,
exacerbated by the flight of the aristocracy and the intelligentsia.
Some anecdotal evidence is claimed to exist of an emerging Russian middle
class self-confident enough to build families. But the decline in Russia's
population reflects processes long-rooted in Russia's social and economic
structure, say the UNDP's Moscow researchers.
They point to two hypotheses invoked to explain fertility decline. "The
first is that the fall in fertility levels in the early 1990s was the population's
response to the socio-economic and political crisis and the country's disintegration,"
they reported. "The other hypothesis says that the sharp decline?€¦was
a continuation of the long-standing trend of demographic transition and
that the crisis merely speeded up the process. If this hypothesis is correct,
it leaves no hope for fertility rates reverting to their erstwhile levels?€¦"
Russia confronts problems in a class of their own, the UN experts have
decided. "The record of developed countries abounds in reliable formulas
for mortality reduction such as raising living standards, protecting and
rehabilitating the environment, active and efficient health care, dissemination
of time-tested behavioral patterns and so on," their analysis said, noting
the massive costs Russia would incur in addressing the ills - chiefly alcohol
related deaths - continuing to sap the strength of the nation's human capital.
Putting the muscle back will indeed take a lot of babies.
-
выступление
в Новосибирске
-
Compounding
A Demographic Disaster