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Putin’s domestic vision also conflicts with US policy, which is
dominated by neoliberal, trickle-down, austerity-crazed, deficit hawkery
that transfers the nations wealth to the 1 percent plutocrats at the top
of the economic foodchain. The Russian president has made great strides
in reducing poverty, eliminating illiteracy, improving healthcare, and
raising the standard of living for millions of working people.
Mike Whitney,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/20/would-putin-make-a-better-president-than-obama/
---
In fact, if we zoom out from the early 1990s, where Parsons has located
the Russian “mortality crisis,” we will see something astounding: it is
not a crisis—unless, of course, a crisis can last decades. “While the
end of the USSR marked one [of] the most momentous political changes of
the twentieth century, that transition has been attended by a gruesome
continuity in adverse health trends for the Russian population,” writes
Nicholas Eberstadt in Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis: Dimensions,
Causes, Implications, an exhaustive study published by the National
Bureau of Asian Research in 2010. Eberstadt is an economist who has been
writing about Soviet and Russian demographics for many years. In this
book-length study, he has painted a picture as grim as it is
mystifying—in part because he is reluctant to offer an explanation for
which he lacks hard data.
Eberstadt is interested in the larger phenomenon of depopulation,
including falling birth rates as well as rising death rates. He observes
that this is not the first such trend in recent Russian history. There
was the decline of 1917–1923—the years of the revolution and the Russian
Civil War when, Eberstadt writes, “depopulation was attributable to the
collapse of birth rates, the upsurge in death rates, and the exodus of
émigrés that resulted from these upheavals.” There was 1933–1934, when
the Soviet population fell by nearly two million as a result of
murderous forced collectivization and a man-made famine that decimated
rural Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, Russia. Then, from 1941 to 1946,
the Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people in the war and
suffered a two-thirds drop in birth rate. But the two-and-a-half decades
since the collapse of the Soviet Union are the longest period of
depopulation, and also the first to occur, on such a scale, in
peacetime, anywhere in the world. “There is no obvious external
application of state force to relieve, no obvious fateful and unnatural
misfortune to weather, in the hopes of reversing this particular
population decline,” writes Eberstadt. “Consequently, it is impossible
to predict when (or even whether) Russia’s present, ongoing depopulation
will finally come to an end.”
Russia has long had a low birth rate. The Soviet government fought to
increase it by introducing a three-year maternity leave and other
inducements, but for much of the postwar period it hovered below
replacement rates. An exception was the Gorbachev era, when fertility
reached 2.2. After 1989, however, it fell and still has not recovered:
despite financial inducements introduced by the Putin government, the
Russian fertility rate stands at 1.61, one of the lowest in the world
(the US fertility rate estimate for 2014 is 2.01, which is also below
replacement but still much higher than Russia’s).
And then there is the dying. In a rare moment of what may pass for
levity Eberstadt allows himself the following chapter subtitle:
“Pioneering New and Modern Pathways to Poor Health and Premature Death.”
Russians did not start dying early and often after the collapse of the
Soviet Union. “To the contrary,” writes Eberstadt, what is happening now
is “merely the latest culmination of ominous trends that have been
darkly evident on Russian soil for almost half a century.” With the
exception of two brief periods—when Soviet Russia was ruled by
Khrushchev and again when it was run by Gorbachev—death rates have been
inexorably rising. This continued to be true even during the period of
unprecedented economic growth between 1999 and 2008. In this study,
published in 2010, Eberstadt accurately predicts that in the coming
years the depopulation trend may be moderated but argues that it will
not be reversed; in 2013 Russia’s birthrate was still lower and its
death rate still higher than they had been in 1991. And 1991 had not
been a good year.
Contrary to Parsons’s argument, moreover, Eberstadt shows that the
current trend is not largely a problem of middle-aged Russians. While
the graphs seem to indicate this, he notes, if one takes into account
the fact that mortality rates normally rise with age, it is the younger
generation that is staring down the most terrifying void. According to
2006 figures, he writes, “overall life expectancy at age fifteen in the
Russian Federation appears in fact to be lower than for some of the
countries the UN designates to be least developed (as opposed to less
developed), among these, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Yemen.” Male life
expectancy at age fifteen in Russia compares unfavorably to that in
Ethiopia, Gambia, and Somalia.
full: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/sep/02/dying-russians/
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