“A series of measures like what Stalin did . . .”

Have you gone mad? Whilst Stalin was taking “measures” by giving medals to mommies, he was also rounding up Russians by the millions and killing them off in gulags.

The very last thing in the world Russia needs right now is to be told it needs to copy Stalin more. That is, unless the goal is to have Russia go extinct.

Putin has already recognized that bribing mothers to have babies won’t increase the population, and he’s already adopted Stalin tactics. A proposal to tax mothers who DON’T have children is in the works, and if that proves in effective you can be sure that sterner measures will follow.

But not because Putin actually wants the population to grow. He’s far too weak to be able to control a dynanmic, thriving population. He wants the country weak and sick, therefore much easier to control. That is why there is no serious policy on AIDS, smoking, drinking and the like, and will be none until the Kremlin fancies itself strong enough to exercise Stalin-like control.

No, these tactics are just more measures to impose controls on the population to the extent the Kremlin can.

Stalin’s policies are responsible for Russia’s current situation, not the cure for it.

People have been saying things like “there are signs that Russia is waking to the problems” for hundreds of years. If Russians were really waking up, would they be favoring a proud KGB spy with 70% approval ratings in polls while the national population plummets rapidly to zero?

SUNDAY, MAY 14, 2006

MOSCOW President Vladimir Putin of Russia drew from the Soviet past last week when he championed the role of motherhood in preventing Russia from becoming a state short of citizens.

The Russian population is shrinking, and demographers warn that it is within a generation of plummeting. If the most pessimistic models hold, the decline could make the country a vast, underpopulated state within four or five decades, a country with too few healthy people for a competitive work force or a capable army.

Russian life, for the peasantry and the proletariat alike, has always been unforgiving. And in a speech reminiscent of Soviet pledges of the state helping the masses so that the masses might help the state, Putin chose the familiar Soviet solution of encouraging stalwart reproduction, telling the obedient Russian Parliament to enact programs of financial incentives to women to have more children.

The Kremlin-friendly news media here – a place that often feels like the land of the single-child family – crowed in approval. The president had spoken: Here is the money, he had essentially said. Russian mothers, fulfill your role.

Beneath the enthusiasm was a question Putin did not address. Will cash incentives work? The data would say: not quite.

There is little doubt that for Russia to be a power through the 21st century its demographic trends must be reversed. There also seems to be no question that Russian mothers, short of feats of fertility unseen in the industrialized world, cannot save Russia alone.

“You have to do this in a variety of ways,” said Murray Feshbach, a demographer at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, who studies the Russian population and its health.

The problems can be found in the numbers. Russia has roughly 143 million people, and the population drops an average of 700,000 each year, largely because of the wide gap between the number of those born and the number who die. More babies will help. But as the population shrinks, Feshbach said, it risks an accelerating collapse that fertility itself cannot reverse.

This is in part because the low birthrate is more than two decades old, and the number of women ages 20 to 29, the most fecund segment of the population, has already fallen to 12 million, he said. In the next several years, women that age will fall to 8 million or fewer – a small contingent to bear the next generation.

And as analysts at the World Bank and the United Nations have pointed out, the threat to the population is not just low birthrates, but high death rates.

The Russian people are deeply unhealthy, so much so that there is no demographic group in the industrial world as ailing and prone to fatal injury as the Russian male, whose average age at death is about 59. Abysmal mortality trends separate Russia from other industrial countries that offer incentives to stimulate population growth, including Japan and Australia.

Moreover, pernicious infections have entered the Russian population since Soviet times, making the country a growing reservoir of people recently infected with tuberculosis, HIV and hepatitis C.

Many of these infections have not yet turned into high rates of disease, but the public health authorities say that as the incubation periods run their course over the next several years, their effects on national health will be evident.

Tuberculosis is already at epidemic levels, and an expected surge in AIDS cases and hepatitis complications could, by the most dire models, kill more than half a million people a year in a generation or two.

There are signs that Russia is waking to the problems. Last month, the Kremlin pushed through a roughly twentyfold increase in its paltry financing for AIDS prevention, diagnosis and treatment – a sign of an understanding of the severity of the problem, said Dmitry Rechnov, a deputy director of AIDS Foundation East-West, a private organization here.

“If we keep on this track, there can be a number of positive developments,” he said.

Still, the Kremlin’s attention to public health has been uneven, and expected increases in mortality related to infectious disease would push up a death rate already driven above norms in industrial countries by high rates of heart disease, cancer, alcoholism, accidents, violence and suicide.

The potential consequences are clear. In a report released last year, the World Bank warned that if Russia did not adopt comprehensive public health programs, it risked a shrinking work force, destabilized families, strains on national security and a drain on its gross domestic product.

And not everyone agrees that cash incentives, which are not part of a comprehensive health program, will even achieve what the Kremlin hopes – more healthy and productive children.

If Putin’s proposals pass, as they almost certainly will, then next year, mothers will receive bonuses worth about $9,000 for giving birth, as well as a graduating scale of monthly cash allowances for infants and subsidies for day care.

Putin did not go as far as past Kremlin leaders, like Stalin, who encouraged women to give birth by offering Medals of Maternal Glory to repopulate a country thinned by repression and war.

Even were Putin to do so, the numbers suggest, without shifts in attitudes and widespread improvements, the traffic at maternity wards would remain slower than the Russians’ rush to the grave.

MOSCOW President Vladimir Putin of Russia drew from the Soviet past last week when he championed the role of motherhood in preventing Russia from becoming a state short of citizens.

The Russian population is shrinking, and demographers warn that it is within a generation of plummeting. If the most pessimistic models hold, the decline could make the country a vast, underpopulated state within four or five decades, a country with too few healthy people for a competitive work force or a capable army.

Russian life, for the peasantry and the proletariat alike, has always been unforgiving. And in a speech reminiscent of Soviet pledges of the state helping the masses so that the masses might help the state, Putin chose the familiar Soviet solution of encouraging stalwart reproduction, telling the obedient Russian Parliament to enact programs of financial incentives to women to have more children.

The Kremlin-friendly news media here – a place that often feels like the land of the single-child family – crowed in approval. The president had spoken: Here is the money, he had essentially said. Russian mothers, fulfill your role.

Beneath the enthusiasm was a question Putin did not address. Will cash incentives work? The data would say: not quite.

There is little doubt that for Russia to be a power through the 21st century its demographic trends must be reversed. There also seems to be no question that Russian mothers, short of feats of fertility unseen in the industrialized world, cannot save Russia alone.

“You have to do this in a variety of ways,” said Murray Feshbach, a demographer at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, who studies the Russian population and its health.

The problems can be found in the numbers. Russia has roughly 143 million people, and the population drops an average of 700,000 each year, largely because of the wide gap between the number of those born and the number who die. More babies will help. But as the population shrinks, Feshbach said, it risks an accelerating collapse that fertility itself cannot reverse.

This is in part because the low birthrate is more than two decades old, and the number of women ages 20 to 29, the most fecund segment of the population, has already fallen to 12 million, he said. In the next several years, women that age will fall to 8 million or fewer – a small contingent to bear the next generation.

And as analysts at the World Bank and the United Nations have pointed out, the threat to the population is not just low birthrates, but high death rates.

The Russian people are deeply unhealthy, so much so that there is no demographic group in the industrial world as ailing and prone to fatal injury as the Russian male, whose average age at death is about 59. Abysmal mortality trends separate Russia from other industrial countries that offer incentives to stimulate population growth, including Japan and Australia.

Moreover, pernicious infections have entered the Russian population since Soviet times, making the country a growing reservoir of people recently infected with tuberculosis, HIV and hepatitis C.

Many of these infections have not yet turned into high rates of disease, but the public health authorities say that as the incubation periods run their course over the next several years, their effects on national health will be evident.

Tuberculosis is already at epidemic levels, and an expected surge in AIDS cases and hepatitis complications could, by the most dire models, kill more than half a million people a year in a generation or two.

There are signs that Russia is waking to the problems. Last month, the Kremlin pushed through a roughly twentyfold increase in its paltry financing for AIDS prevention, diagnosis and treatment – a sign of an understanding of the severity of the problem, said Dmitry Rechnov, a deputy director of AIDS Foundation East-West, a private organization here.

“If we keep on this track, there can be a number of positive developments,” he said.

Still, the Kremlin’s attention to public health has been uneven, and expected increases in mortality related to infectious disease would push up a death rate already driven above norms in industrial countries by high rates of heart disease, cancer, alcoholism, accidents, violence and suicide.

The potential consequences are clear. In a report released last year, the World Bank warned that if Russia did not adopt comprehensive public health programs, it risked a shrinking work force, destabilized families, strains on national security and a drain on its gross domestic product.

And not everyone agrees that cash incentives, which are not part of a comprehensive health program, will even achieve what the Kremlin hopes – more healthy and productive children.

If Putin’s proposals pass, as they almost certainly will, then next year, mothers will receive bonuses worth about $9,000 for giving birth, as well as a graduating scale of monthly cash allowances for infants and subsidies for day care.

Putin did not go as far as past Kremlin leaders, like Stalin, who encouraged women to give birth by offering Medals of Maternal Glory to repopulate a country thinned by repression and war.

Even were Putin to do so, the numbers suggest, without shifts in attitudes and widespread improvements, the traffic at maternity wards would remain slower than the Russians’ rush to the grave

“You have to do this in a variety of ways,” said Murray Feshbach, a demographer at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, who studies the Russian population and its health.

The problems can be found in the numbers. Russia has roughly 143 million people, and the population drops an average of 700,000 each year, largely because of the wide gap between the number of those born and the number who die. More babies will help. But as the population shrinks, Feshbach said, it risks an accelerating collapse that fertility itself cannot reverse.

There are signs that Russia is waking to the problems. Last month, the Kremlin pushed through a roughly twentyfold increase in its paltry financing for AIDS prevention, diagnosis and treatment – a sign of an understanding of the severity of the problem, said Dmitry Rechnov, a deputy director of AIDS Foundation East-West, a private organization here.

“If we keep on this track, there can be a number of positive developments,” he said.

Still, the Kremlin’s attention to public health has been uneven, and expected increases in mortality related to infectious disease would push up a death rate already driven above norms in industrial countries by high rates of heart disease, cancer, alcoholism, accidents, violence and suicide.

The potential consequences are clear. In a report released last year, the World Bank warned that if Russia did not adopt comprehensive public health programs, it risked a shrinking work force, destabilized families, strains on national security and a drain on its gross domestic product.

And not everyone agrees that cash incentives, which are not part of a comprehensive health program, will even achieve what the Kremlin hopes – more healthy and productive children.

If Putin’s proposals pass, as they almost certainly will, then next year, mothers will receive bonuses worth about $9,000 for giving birth, as well as a graduating scale of monthly cash allowances for infants and subsidies for day care.

Putin did not go as far as past Kremlin leaders, like Stalin, who encouraged women to give birth by offering Medals of Maternal Glory to repopulate a country thinned by repression and war.

A series of measures like what Stalin did plus immigration(selective no doubt), involvement of college graduates from other countries etc, ethnic Russians to come, workers’ permits etc are immediately required!

On the issue of demographics. I agree with Astana on the problems of demographics. But still I think they are interesting and give us some idea of general and possible trends. They do not, however, factor in sudden events and chance. So I think they are good for discussion and trying to think about the state of affairs, but they certainly shouldn’t be taken as total evidence of the present let alone the future.

On the legacy of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Its funny, the legacy of the old tsarist ideology and culture was exactly the argument the Bolsheviks used in the 1920s and 30s! But anyway, that is another issue . . . I think that this legacy is best though in generational terms. The few completely Sovetskie people left are of the war generation. The Khrushchev and Brezhnev generations are an interesting hybrid that can be cut in a variety of percentages. In terms of the power of Marxist-Leninist ideology, I recommend this book: Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Yurchak is an anthropologist at Berkeley. In my opinion, I don’t think we should overdetermine the force and substance of M-L ideology in the late Soviet period. As Yurchak argues, by the 1960s much of the words were refilled with different, and often contradictory meanings.

Lastly, all of our discussion points to the problem of “transitional society.” I question the usefulness of transition for several reasons. Briefly, it suggests a linear, even an eschatological development of society where there is an ideal goal. A country in transition has to be transitioning to something. Second, it measures a country’s “transition” (read backwardness) with other states that are identified as “advanced” (hence my mention of Jameson’s idea of singular modernity.) Third, who decides when the transition is over? Here I think that it never ends because those in transition, developing, modernizing or whatever label you want to ascribe, will never catch up because they never will be exactly like the European and American model. They will always be, as Homi Bhabha eloquently put it, “almost, but not quite.”

well, i don’t think anyone can be totally subjective in analyzing reality. it’s is bound to be colored by perception. and perception springs from our backgrounds. sean’s analysis reflects his lack of first hand experience of life in the soviet union. mine, somewhat wistful perception of the events unfolding, is a throwback to the euphoria of the late 80s and early 90s when democracy and equitable prosperity seemed to be ours for the taking. of course, sean is extremely well read and what he doesn’t know about the soviet union is probably not worth knowing, but there’s no substituting for actually *living* in that country: standing endlessly in line to buy basic necessities, having to go to the kgb every time u wanted to go abroad, whispering in the kitchen for fear of ur neighbors rating u out, etc etc etc. no amount of reading and research can fill in for that. so when i see russia’s making a tentative turn back to what i hoped had been demolished once and for all, i can’t help but feel a sickening sense of deja-vu. and if my concern seems embellished, exaggerated, bitter, prejudiced etc, well so be it. if i had an option of going back to a prosperous stable country not unlike urs if things headed south here, then i’d probably be as nonchalant as the next guy. alas, i can’t and i won’t.

Don’t drink and post my dear.

By the way, do you say “the elected President of [the USA]. In 2 years time when he has stepped down from the Presidency, are writers still going to be throwing around such over-loaded language and terms to describe him or his time in office?” when George Bush is the topic? Do you defend him this way to foriegners?

Truly, your duplicity knows no bounds.

Pundits and others seem too busy talking about what Russia is moving towards, with language full of dark and ominous terms. It is much better (and difficult enough) to simple discuss what the situation in Russia currently is and to do that – without embellishment, without exaggeration, without bitterness, without bigotry, without insults, without prejudice.

I think Sean’s analysis and response was really well written and spot on. This whole topic is worthy of submittal to JRL or anywhere else that might publish or distribute conversations and analysis of Russia today.

You miss the forest for the trees. You constantly talk about how NOT to describe Putin. He’s NOT a fascist. He’s NOT a Neo-Soviet. But you never give your idea of how he SHOULD be described, IN SUCH A WAY AS TO CONDEMN HIM in a way that is readily accessible to people and leads to opposition. Without doing this, in essence, you’re serving Putin’s interests by simply muddying the waters and helping him cling to power.