TW: Russia has always lived with a level of upheaval unbeknown st to most in the West. Between their revolution, the Stalinist purges and WWII not to mention longer past events, Russia has seen its power and population wax and frequently wane. The current demographics in Russia are unique not only in their relatively weak birth rate but stunningly high death rate. Chronic alcoholism, shaky health care, disproportionately high death rates from various forms of violence etc. are combining to erode Russia's population by roughly 2,000 people per day.
Putin/Medvedev et al. are striving to restore Russia to superpower status. When you are losing 2K folks per day almost a million annually such ambitions are paradoxical. Sustained above average economic growth regardless of one's natural resources becomes highly unlikely. Funding and sustaining world power level armed forces equally challenging. Some fear the reemergence of a powerful Russia akin to the old USSR days. I do not think so. And rather than poking the West in the eye whenever an opportunity arises Russia needs to focus on restoring its demographic balance lest their borders implode inward. After all they face rapidly growing China in their east, restive Islamic states to their south and skeptical potential to their west. They should be seeking to be our best friends not an annoying foil.
From World Affairs:
"...Since 1992, Russia’s human numbers have been progressively dwindling. This slow motion process now taking place in the country carries with it grim and potentially disastrous implications that threaten to recast the contours of life and society in Russia, to diminish the prospects for Russian economic development, and to affect Russia’s potential influence on the world stage in the years ahead.
...Between 1976 and 1991, the last sixteen years of Soviet power, the country recorded 36 million births. In the sixteen post-Communist years of 1992–2007, there were just 22.3 million, a drop in childbearing of nearly 40 percent from one era to the next. On the other side of the life cycle, a total of 24.6 million deaths were recorded between 1976 and 1991, while in the first sixteen years of the post-Communist period the Russian Federation tallied 34.7 million deaths, a rise of just over 40 percent. The symmetry is striking: in the last sixteen years of the Communist era, births exceeded deaths in Russia by 11.4 million; in the first sixteen years of the post-Soviet era, deaths exceeded births by 12.4 million.
...As of mid-year 2005, Russia’s estimated population was around 143 million...The Census Bureau’s projections for the Russian Federation’s population in 2025 and 2030 are 128 million and 124 million, respectively.
...Strikingly, and perhaps paradoxically, Moscow’s leadership is advancing into this uncertain terrain not only with insouciance but with highly ambitious goals. In late 2007, for example, the Kremlin outlined the objective of achieving and maintaining an average annual pace of economic growth in the decades ahead on the order of nearly 7 percent a year: on this path, according to Russian officials, GDP will quadruple in the next two decades, and the Russian Federation will emerge as the world’s fifth largest economy by 2020. But history offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline.
...Like the urbanized and literate societies in Western Europe, North America, and elsewhere, the overwhelming majority of deaths in Russia today accrue from chronic rather than infectious diseases: heart disease, cancers, strokes, and the like. But in the rest of the developed world, death rates from these chronic diseases are low, relatively stable, and declining regularly over time. In the Russian Federation, by contrast, overall mortality levels are high, manifestly unstable, and rising."
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2009%20-%20Spring/full-Eberstadt.html
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