Текст книги "Implosion. The end of Russia and what it means for America"

Автор книги: Ilan Berman

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CHAPTER TWO

THE NEW SICK MAN OF EUROPE

A century ago, the Ottoman Empire was known as the “sick man of Europe.” At the height of its power in the seventeenth century, its territory and influence stretched from Africa to Asia and encompassed thirty-nine million people in more than thirty nations—nearly a tenth of the world’s population at the time. But by the early twentieth century, Ottoman rule was in terminal decline, riven by conflicts along its periphery and torn apart by internal political strife. Its death throes contributed to the outbreak of the First World War and helped redraw the geopolitical map of the West.

Today, Russia has assumed the mantle of Europe’s “sick man.” The causes of Russia’s illness include low birth rates, meager life expectancy, a culture of abortion, the collapse of the Russian family, and an escalating AIDS epidemic. The results are nothing short of catastrophic; at its current rate of decline, the population of the Russian Federation could plummet to just over one hundred million souls by the middle of this century. ¹

RUSSIA’S DEPOPULATION BOMB

Demography, it is often said, is destiny. How a population changes over time can determine whether a nation succeeds or fails. Yet few students of international affairs pay much attention to demographics, preferring to focus on subjects such as military history and strategic culture. Fewer still appreciate the profound impact that demography has on the course of global geopolitics.

So it is with Russia. For years, a handful of scholars have sounded the alarm over Russia’s unfolding demographic disaster and its dire strategic implications for Russia and the West. In the main, however, Russia’s demographic collapse is still poorly understood and under-appreciated among both policymakers in Washington and the American public at large.

The math behind Russia’s decline is complex, and stark. Countries require an average of 2.1 live births per woman to maintain a stable population. That formula is known as the “total fertility rate,” or TFR. Today, the countries of Africa have the highest TFRs in the world, ranging from the prolific (Niger: 7.61) to the merely robust (Zimbabwe: 3.61). ²In other words, in much of Africa societal continuity is not in question (even though a host of other issues—from economic prosperity to political stability—are).

Other countries, such as Turkey, Nicaragua, and Turkmenistan, generally have stable populations, with fertility at right around the rate necessary for replenishment. ³The United States is among them: America’s TFR is more or less stable at 2.06, thanks in part to high levels of immigration (mostly from Latin American countries).

Other countries are dying, with fertility rates far below replacement levels. Canada’s is 1.59; Japan’s just 1.39. ⁴The TFRs of most European countries are lower still, with a median of just 1.38. This has led columnist Mark Steyn to wryly observe that, “Unless it corrects course within the next five to ten years, Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will be standing but the people who built them will be gone.” ⁵

In this grim calculus, Russia ranks close to the bottom. According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, in the years between 2000 and 2008, Russia’s average annual fertility rate was 1.34, far below the 2.1 necessary to maintain a population at its current size. ⁶

Today, the situation is a bit better. According to U.S. government estimates, Russia now ranks 178th in the world, with a TFR of 1.61. ⁷And in 2012, for the first time since the fall of the USSR, live births outnumbered deaths in Russia. They did so modestly (the country’s population grew by just over two hundred thousand between January and September 2012), but it was enough for Kremlin officials to proclaim that their country’s demographic fortunes had been reversed. ⁸

Experts are less optimistic. Some have cautioned that Russia’s demographic reversal is fragile and temporary. In 2010, one of Russia’s leading demographers, Anatoly Vishnevsky of the Moscow Institute of Demography, warned, “In five years, Russia will again begin dying out.” Vishnevsky noted that the “youth bulge” (and corresponding spike in fertility), which had slowed Russia’s demographic decline, was close to being exhausted, and that as a result “the country is approaching the edge of a demographic abyss.” ⁹Recent studies have come to the same conclusion. A 2012 survey by Aton, a Moscow-based investment bank, concluded that Russia’s current demographic upswing is only temporary and that the country “will soon face another protracted demographic decline.” ¹⁰

In truth, Russia’s demographic descent is not a new or surprising phenomenon. Early signs of a population downturn began to appear as long ago as the 1960s, and by the 1970s total fertility had dropped to less than two children per woman in almost all of the Soviet Union’s European republics. ¹¹

But these facts did not comport with the Soviet Union’s view of itself as a great and growing power. Thus in early 1991, just months before the USSR’s collapse, the Institute for Scientific Information, a research center of the prestigious Soviet Academy of Sciences, issued a rosy outlook on Soviet demography. Internal population growth within the Soviet Union was strong, the study declared, and the number of ethnic Russians within the USSR would grow by as much as two million over the following half decade. By 2015, the report predicted, ethnic Russians would number 158 million. ¹²

The reality has proven to be very different. Russia’s most recent national census found that the population of Russia shrank by nearly 3 percent in the eight years between 2002 and 2010 and now stands at 142.9 million. ¹³If current trends continue, by 2050 official Kremlin estimates project that Russia’s population will dwindle to just 107 million. ¹⁴

THE DRIVERS OF DECLINE

Russia’s demographic decline is a consequence of societal dysfunctions that took root during the decades of repressive Communist rule. Here is a brief description of just a few of those drivers.

SKY-HIGH MORTALITY

The years that followed the breakup of the USSR were economically and politically tumultuous for the countries of the former Soviet Union. The human cost of Russia’s transition was particularly severe, with many post-Soviet countries seeing dramatic drops in life expectancy.

During the Cold War, life expectancy in Russia was only slightly lower than in the United States. But as the decades of political and military tension between Moscow and Washington wore on, a real—and widening—mortality gap emerged. The gap narrowed in the 1980s with Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika(and its attendant focus on public health). But following the Soviet collapse, Russian life expectancy again plummeted, dropping some 6.6 years for men and 3.3 years for women between 1989 and 1994. ¹⁵

While the mortality rates of most other countries affected by the USSR’s crack-up have largely stabilized, Russian life expectancy has remained low. In 2004, Russia ranked 122nd in the world in life expectancy, placing it in the bottom third of all nations and far outside the norm for industrialized ones. ¹⁶By 2011, that number had plunged some twenty-two places, to 144th. ¹⁷The average life expectancy for Russian citizens is now seventy years, putting them behind the citizens of Peru and Tonga (average life expectancy: seventy-one) and only slightly ahead of those in countries such as Tuvalu, Mongolia, and North Korea. ¹⁸

Russian males have been particularly hard-hit. On average, they can expect to live just sixty years—less than their counterparts born in Botswana, Madagascar, and Yemen. The life expectancy of Russian males is, generally, a decade and a half shorter than those in other industrialized nations. ¹⁹

The situation for Russian women is slightly better. Females there can expect to live until they are seventy-three, roughly the same age as women in neighboring Kazakhstan or in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. ²⁰But, like Russian men, Russian women have nothing resembling the life expectancy of their counterparts in the West.

Russia’s plummeting life expectancy is counterintuitive. “The Russian experience grates against conventional wisdom about the progress of global health and social standards over the last century,” Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah of the American Enterprise Institute have written. “It is unprecedented for a well-educated, modern European society to mimic mortality rates of a Third World country.” ²¹And yet, that is exactly what Russia has done.

The causes are many, from poor healthcare to rampant alcoholism, particularly among Russian men. Russian scientists estimate that one in five male deaths in Russia today is alcohol-related. ²²And while alcoholism is a problem across Russian society, the country’s youth are disproportionately affected. Alcoholism among Russian youth contributes to a death rate at age thirty-five that is seven times that found in the European Union, according to Yuri Krupnov, director of Moscow’s Institute of Demography, Migration and Regional Development. ²³

Russia’s drinking problem may be contributing to its decline, but it’s not the only factor. Russia is coming apart at a more fundamental level.

COLLAPSE OF THE RUSSIAN FAMILY

During the early part of the Cold War, the harsh realities of life under Communist rule kept families unified and tightly knit. Communal apartments, colloquially known as komunalki, were typical, as was having multiple generations of one family living under the same roof. In 1958, divorces in the USSR were virtually nonexistent—just 0.9 per one thousand citizens. ²⁴By the end of the 1970s, that rate had risen slightly to 3.6 per one thousand. ²⁵But Soviet-era restrictions on individual mobility, coupled with widespread economic hardship, helped keep most families together.

By contrast, the past two decades of freewheeling capitalism and post-Communist disorder have coincided with a collapse of the Russian family. According to the UN’s 2011 Demographic Yearbook, Russia now has the highest divorce rate in the world, with half of all unions ending in divorce (and 60 percent of those dissolving within the first decade). ²⁶

This does not mean that Russians are not procreating. Far from it, as the abortion rate (discussed below) indicates. It suggests, rather, that nuclear families with multiple children are quickly becoming an endangered species in Russia.

A CULTURE OF ABORTION

Under Communist rule, abortion was the only practical method of birth control available to Soviet citizens, and it was employed extensively. In 1964, there were 278 abortions for every one hundred live births in the USSR, a rate that far outpaced those in the West. ²⁷Russia’s abortion rate remained high through the 1970s and 1980s, with the number of abortions exceeding 4.5 million annually. ²⁸

Russia’s abortion rate gradually began to decline as Soviet authorities—and then Russian ones—became more conscious of the negative effects of abortion, and more restrictive in its authorization. In 2006, for the first time, the trend reversed, with ninety-five abortions for every hundred live births. ²⁹

But this progress is relative. Russia still has the highest abortion rate in the world. In 2010, 1,186,000 abortions were performed in Russia—that’s three hundred abortions every hour. ³⁰It also means that close to one percent of the country’s population is being aborted every year—literally killing chances for positive population growth in the process.

But the official estimates may not capture the true extent of Russia’s abortion culture. According to Igor Beloborodov of Moscow’s Institute of Demographic Studies, the actual number of annual abortions performed in Russia is as much as double the official figure—some 2 to 2.5 million in all—owing to “a vast layer of private clinics” that carry out the procedure in parallel to official hospitals and facilities. ³¹If Beloborodov’s tally is accurate, then the true cost of Russia’s abortion culture is the annual termination of close to 2 percent of the Russian Federation’s potential population. In a real sense, Russians are aborting their future.

AN AIDS EPIDEMIC

HIV/AIDS first appeared in Russia later than it did in other parts of the world, in part because of a lack of mobility and travel among the captive population of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Russia registered its first cases of HIV/AIDS in 1987—half a decade after the disease became prevalent in the West. ³²

Once AIDS did arrive in post-Soviet Russia, however, it spread quickly. By the end of the 1990s, documented cases of AIDS in the Russian Federation stood at approximately twenty thousand. Less than a decade later, Russian experts began calling their country’s encounter with HIV an epidemic. “We have an estimate of up to 1.2 million to 1.3 million infected with HIV,” Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the Russian government’s AIDS center, told reporters in May 2007. ³³“Not only is the number of Russians infected with HIV rising but there is an increase in the rate at which the epidemic is spreading, so [there is] a rise in the number of newly infected.” ³⁴

Blood infected by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, spreads easily when people share equipment to use drugs. Some 2.5 million Russians are estimated to be addicted to drugs today, with heroin as the overwhelming drug of choice. ³⁵According to the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, Russian consumption accounts for more than a fifth of all heroin consumed globally every year. This trend has contributed greatly to the spread of AIDS in Russia. According to a 2012 briefing paper compiled by the International AIDS Society, more than one third of the country’s users of injectable drugs have HIV. ³⁶

Over the past decade, AIDS-related deaths in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have skyrocketed, increasing elevenfold since 2001. Russia and Ukraine cumulatively accounted for roughly 90 percent of the ninety thousand AIDS deaths in the region in 2010. ³⁷That statistic stands out even more when compared with the rest of the world, where AIDS deaths have fallen by more than a fifth since their peak in 2005. ³⁸In other words, while the rest of the world is beginning to win the battle against AIDS, the Russian Federation is increasingly succumbing to it.

A FLEEING POPULATION

Russians have been fleeing their homeland for decades. During the decades of the Cold War, Soviet rule was punctuated by repeated waves of politically and religiously motivated flight. Even so, the pace at which people are leaving Russia today is notable—and deeply concerning. Between 100,000 and 150,000 Russians now emigrate every year, compounding Russia’s population crisis. ³⁹

Russians are fleeing for both economic and political reasons. A 2011 poll by the Moscow-based Levada Center identified economic pressures—such as the high cost of living—as principal factors in Russians’ decision to depart. ⁴⁰But much of the blame rests with the Russian government as well. Over the past decade, the autocratic state established by Vladimir Putin and his followers has made a tiny minority of Russians wildly rich, while the vast majority of Russians are left to grapple with an environment that is deeply toxic to entrepreneurship, innovation, and honest business. This includes high-profile instances of Kremlin retribution against those who seek to change the status quo. One such victim was lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was imprisoned in 2009 for his investigation into official government corruption, and who subsequently died behind bars after being denied medical treatment for gallstones and pancreatitis.

The result is an exodus of Russians that rivals in size and scope the mass out-migration that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. “The most independent and qualified people are leaving and for the same fundamental reasons,” political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin noted in the newspaper Novaya Gazetain January 2011. “The model of the state built by Lenin and Stalin and softly being restored by Putin is flawed from the outset.” ⁴¹

More than two million people are believed to have left Russia during the thirteen years that President Vladimir Putin has been in power. ⁴²Many of those who stay are thinking of leaving. A 2012 poll by the RIA Novosti news agency found that one in five Russians desires to live abroad. ⁴³The problem is particularly acute among Russia’s youth: according to one estimate, nearly 40 percent of Russians between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five are contemplating departure. ⁴⁴

This mass exodus is having a devastating effect on the Russian economy. By 2030, it is estimated that the country will lose as many as seventeen million skilled workers—close to a quarter of its total workforce of 75.4 million. ⁴⁵Farther into the future, Russia’s working population is projected to be smaller still, with catastrophic effects on the country’s productivity and economic dynamism. (So profound has this trend become that the International Monetary Fund recently suggested that the Russian government raise the retirement age to sixty-three by 2030 in order to preserve its labor force.) ⁴⁶

REMEDYING THE PROBLEM?

Russians are not ignorant of their demographic dilemma, and neither is the Kremlin. Putin has described Russia’s demographic decline as “the most acute problem of contemporary Russia.” ⁴⁷But his government has not implemented a plausible strategy for remedying the situation. Rather, preoccupied with regaining its place as a global power, it has only peripherally begun to address the drivers of national decline.

In 2008, for example, Russia established a Day of Married Love and Family Happiness—portrayed as an alternative to Valentine’s Day—in an effort to reinforce the importance of the family unit. ⁴⁸In 2010, the Russian government launched the “mother’s capital” program, which provides a government credit of about $11,000 to mothers who have a second or third child. ⁴⁹This was followed by the announcement in April 2011 that the Russian government would invest some 1.5 trillion rubles ($50 billion) into “demography projects.” ⁵⁰The same month, the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, introduced legislation to discourage abortion by disqualifying it from coverage under the national medical service. That summer, then president Dmitry Medvedev signed the first law since the end of communism to restrict abortion. ⁵¹

More recently, Putin pledged that families with more than three children will receive monthly subsidies of $250 per child. ⁵²The Kremlin has become so desperate to encourage procreation that in early 2013 it tried to turn 1990s R&B crooners Boyz II Men into demographic Viagra. The group was invited to Moscow to play a Valentine’s Day concert in hopes that their music would make concertgoers amorous, leading to lovemaking. ⁵³

What Russia has notdone is make serious investments in vital infrastructure—the social services and education that cumulatively serve as the lifeblood of a vibrant society. Unlike the United States, which used the 1990s to rebuild and reorient its economy toward domestic prosperity, Russia experienced no analogous “peace dividend” following the collapse of the USSR. Rather, Russia limped through its first post-Soviet decade buffeted by economic instability, culminating in a catastrophic economic meltdown in 1998.

In the last dozen years, Russia’s economy has stabilized, largely due to the high price of world energy and Russia’s emergence as a bona fide oil and natural gas powerhouse. But Russia’s energy boom has not translated into meaningful improvements to the country’s social safety net. According to a 2011 study by the European Union, Russia’s healthcare expenditures have stagnated as a percentage of GDP since 1995. ⁵⁴Nor are there many plans for upgrades on the horizon. In September 2012, Deputy Economic Development Minister Andrey Klepach announced that no reform in the education, public health, and science sectors was possible in the near term because of the government’s budget priorities. ⁵⁵

What are those priorities, exactly? Over the past decade, Russia’s national treasure has been expended overwhelmingly on projects that reaffirm its image and perception of itself as a great power. These include the country’s strategic arsenal, which is now undergoing a major modernization aimed in part at countering and defeating U.S. missile defenses. ⁵⁶But the quiet human catastrophe now reshaping Russia at home has been left largely unaddressed.

A CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE

What makes Russia’s demographic decline so devastating is that it reflects the outlook many Russians have of themselves. The trends—high mortality, rampant alcoholism and drug use, widespread abortion and divorce, and emigration—are the symptoms of a population that has lost hope in its future, and of a citizenry that has given up on their government as a steward of their needs and protector of their rights and freedoms.

The results have been predictable. Russians with the means to leave have already done so or are actively contemplating an exit. (In an accurate microcosm of the prevailing mood among Russians, a popular blog on current social ills is entitled Pora Valit: time to scram.) ⁵⁷Those who are unable to leave have embraced alcohol, drugs, and other means of coping to get by. And still others have gone to even greater extremes: in the two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union, an estimated eight hundred thousand Russians have committed suicide. ⁵⁸That is one suicide every fifteen minutes.

In a nation that is coming apart, many of Russia’s citizens appear to be united by one thing: the stark realization that, for all of the Kremlin’s talk of renewed national greatness, the Russian state is a dying project.