This is an amazing observation......I had no idea Russia's population was in decline although I knew its life expectancies were dropping. Its paying a steep price to go from totalitarianism to capitalism and democracy.
Population gloom
A new study says Russia's demographic 'devastation' has left it facing increasing crisis.
Tom Parfitt reports
Thursday December 29, 2005
Boris Vasiliev stomped down the snow-covered track that is the main street of his village and paused outside a dilapidated single-storey building.
"That used to be the doctor's surgery," he said, and then pointed back the way he had come. "Down there was the shop. A bit further, the social club."
Either side of the track were two long lines of empty wooden cottages. Buyavino, in the Tver region 130 miles north of Moscow, is one of tens of thousands of Russian villages slowly dying out as the country faces an alarming decline in its population.
When Guardian Unlimited visited earlier this year, Mr Vasiliev, a 58-year-old forestry worker, was the youngest person in the village and the only one with a job.
"Once there was a family in every one of these 50 houses," he said. "Now there are just 13 of us left."
Nearby fields, which had been full of carefully tended crops a few years ago, were overrun with weeds in summer. Two of the villagers did nothing but drink, Mr Vasiliev said. The son of another had recently died from a heroin overdose.
While millions have abandoned Russia's villages to seek a better life in the cities, the country's high mortality rate has taken a punishing toll on places such as Buyavino.
Alcoholism, tuberculosis and Aids - as well as road accidents, suicides and other unnatural causes of death - are eroding the population at an alarming speed.
Circulatory diseases, exacerbated by stress, are a major killer. Life expectancy for a man has sunk to 58 years (72 for women), the lowest bar two of the 52 countries in the WHO European region.
Russia's population has plummeted by almost 7% to 143 million in the last 15 years, and is predicted to drop by another 20 million by 2025. And as Moscow gears up to take over the presidency of the G8 on January 1, the Kremlin is being urged to meet the crisis head on.
In a report published last week, Delovaya Rossiya, a business lobby group, predicted that the country would lose an astonishing $400bn (£232bn) in the next two decades if it failed to tackle the population dive.
Inadequate government efforts to encourage immigration, support young families and promote healthy eating are having a disastrous effect on President Vladimir Putin's oft-repeated desire to double GDP, it said.
In another study published earlier this month, the World Bank concluded that Russia would never compete with the other G8 countries if it did not address its health deficit and demographic decline.
The study, titled Dying Too Young, warned that Russia's demographic "devastation" was unprecedented among industrialised nations and threatened to shave billions off its GDP.
The World Bank put much of the blame on high rates of heart disease and other non-communicable diseases that could be mitigated by improved healthcare.
The authors of the Delovaya Rossiya report suggest that only drastic measures - such as a 2% tax on families without children - could stem the population slump.
Andrei Korovkin, a labour resources expert, said: "The deficit of labour is already being noticed. Even with a pessimistic view of economic growth, by 2010 it will become the most serious fact limiting the development of Russian industry."
Kirill Ekonomov, a demographer, thought immediate measures were needed to stimulate the birth rate. "The level of state support to parents is miserly," he said. "Even couples who want children cannot afford to do so."
There have been some encouraging signs, however. In September, Mr Putin promised an extra $4bn for spending next year on four key areas - education, healthcare, housing and agriculture. An amnesty is expected for immigrants from the former Soviet countries who live in Russia with uncertain status.
Yet outside cities and towns, healthcare services remain thinly spread.
"If you get sick with something serious when the road is blocked by snow, then you might as well go straight to the cemetery," said 72-year-old Anna Boloshina, who lives opposite Buyavino's abandoned "medpunkt" (a one-doctor surgery).
Ten miles from the village, in the city of Tver, Lyudmila Titova - the regional chairman of Goskomstat, the federal state statistics service - showed graphs illustrating the plunge in the local population.
"This is our tragedy," she said. "The decline in industry, the closure of factories, the uncertainty of the period of reforms, the inflation, the poverty - all those things contributed to high mortality."
However, demographers insist low birthrate remains the overriding factor in the population decrease, and can only be changed by stimulating business.
"The recent collapse of fertility in Russia has been almost completely economic," Carl Haub, a researcher at the Washington-based Population Research Bureau, said. "When people are uncertain about the future, they don't have children."
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