Mark Steyn: The death of Mother Russia

Reader Jack Fulmer sent me the following item, which appeared a century ago — 13 September 1905 — in the Paris edition of the New York Herald:

And in the long run it’s hard to see why they won’t get it, the only question being whether it’s still worth getting. Moscow has reduced Grozny to rubble, yet is further than ever from solving its Chechen problem. Moreover, the sheer blundering thuggery of the Russian approach has no merits other than affording Moscow some short-term sadistic pleasure as it exacerbates the situation. The allegedly seething ‘Arab street’, which the West’s media doom-mongers have been predicting for four years will rise up in fury against the Anglo-American infidels, remains as seething as a cul-de-sac in Pinner on a Wednesday afternoon. But the Russian Federation’s Muslim street is real, and on the boil.

Remember the months before 9/11? The new US President had his first meeting with the Russian President. ‘I looked the man in the eye and found him very straightforward and trustworthy,’ George W. Bush said after two hours with Vladimir Putin. ‘I was able to get a sense of his soul.’ I’m all for speaking softly and carrying a big stick, but that’s way too soft; it’s candlelight-dinner-with-the-glow-reflecting-in-the-wine-glass-just-before-you-ask-her-to-dance-to-‘Moonlight-Becomes-You’ soft. Even at the time, many of us felt like yelling at Bush: Get a grip on yourself, man! Lay off the homoerotic stuff about soulmates! This is a KGB apparatchik you’re making eyes at.

But Putin was broadly supportive — or at least not actively non-supportive — on Afghanistan (a very particular case) and Nato expansion (a fait accompli), and some experts started calling Vlad the most Westernised Russian strongman since Peter the Great and cooing about a Russo-American alliance that would be one of the cornerstones of the post-Cold War world.

It’s not like that today. From China to Central Asia to Ukraine, from its covert efforts to maintain Saddam in power to its more or less unashamed patronage of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Moscow has been at odds with Washington over every key geopolitical issue, and a few non-key ones, too, culminating in Putin’s tirade to Bush that America was flooding Russia with sub-standard chicken drumsticks and keeping the best ones for herself. It was a poultry complaint but indicative of a retreat into old-school Kremlin paranoia. Putin was sending America’s chickens home to roost. I wonder if Bush took a second look into the soulful depths of Vladimir’s eyes and decided he wasn’t quite so finger-lickin’ good after all.

Russia’s export of ideology was the decisive factor in the history of the last century. It seems to me entirely possible that the implosion of Russia could be the decisive factor in this new century. As Iran’s nuke programme suggests, in many of the geopolitical challenges to America there’s usually a Russian component somewhere in the background.

In fairness to Putin, even if he was ‘very straightforward and trustworthy’, he’s in a wretched position. Think of the feet of clay of Western European politicians unwilling to show leadership on the Continent’s moribund economy and deathbed demography. Russia has all the EU’s problems to the nth degree, and then some. ‘Post-imperial decline’ is manageable; a nation of psychotic lemmings isn’t. As I’ve noted before in this space, Russia is literally dying. From a population peak in 1992 of 148 million, it will be down to below 130 million by 2015 and thereafter dropping to perhaps 50 or 60 million by the end of the century, a third of what it was at the fall of the Soviet Union. It needn’t decline at a consistent rate, of course. But I’d say it’s more likely to be even lower than 50 million than it is to be over 100 million. The longer Russia goes without arresting the death spiral, the harder it is to pull out of it, and when it comes to the future most Russian women are voting with their foetus: 70 per cent of pregnancies are aborted.

A smaller population needn’t necessarily be a problem, and especially not for a state with too much of the citizenry on the payroll. But Russia is facing simultaneously a massive ongoing drain of wealth out of the system. Whether or not Dominic Midgley was correct the other day in his assertion that the émigré oligarchs prefer London to America, I cannot say. But I notice my own peripheral backwater of Montreal has also filled up with Russkies whose impressive riches have been acquired recently and swiftly. It doesn’t help the grim demographic scenario if your economic base is also being systematically eaten away.

Add to that the unprecedented strains on a ramshackle public health system. Russia is the sick man of Europe, and would still look pretty sick if you moved him to Africa. It has the fastest-growing rate of HIV infection in the world. From virtually no official Aids cases at the time Putin took office, in the last five years more Russians have tested positive than in the previous 20 for America. The virus is said to have infected at least 1 per cent of the population, the figure the World Health Organisation considers the tipping point for a sub-Saharan-sized epidemic. So at a time when Russian men already have a life expectancy in the mid-50s — lower than in Bangladesh — they’re about to see Aids cut them down from the other end, killing young men and women of childbearing age, and with them any hope of societal regeneration. By 2010, Aids will be killing between a quarter and three-quarters of a million Russians every year. It will become a nation of babushkas, unable to muster enough young soldiers to secure its borders, enough young businessmen to secure its economy or enough young families to secure its future. True, there are regions that are exceptions to these malign trends, parts of Russia that have healthy fertility rates and low HIV infection. Can you guess which regions they are? They start with a ‘Mu-’ and end with a ‘-slim’.

So the world’s largest country is dying and the only question is how violent its death throes are. Yesterday’s Russia was characterised by Churchill as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Today’s has come unwrapped: it’s a crisis in a disaster inside a catastrophe. Most of the big international problems operate within certain geographic constraints: Africa has Aids, the Middle East has Islamists, North Korea has nukes. But Russia’s got the lot: an African-level Aids crisis and an Islamist separatist movement sitting on top of the biggest pile of nukes on the planet. Of course, the nuclear materials are all in ‘secure’ facilities — more secure, one hopes, than the secure public buildings in Nalchik that the Islamists took over with such ease last week.

Russia is the bleakest example on the planet of how we worry about all the wrong things. For 40 years the environmentalists have warned us that the jig was up: there are too many people (see Paul Ehrlich’s comic masterpiece of 1970 The Population Bomb) and too few resources — as the Club of Rome warned in its 1972 landmark study The Limits To Growth, the world will run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993. Instead, poor old Russia is awash with resources but fatally short of Russians — and, in the end, warm bodies are the one indispensable resource.

What would you do if you were Putin? What have you got to keep your rotting corpse of a country as some kind of player? You’ve got nuclear know-how — which a lot of ayatollahs and dictators are interested in. You’ve got an empty resource-rich eastern hinterland — which the Chinese are going to wind up with one way or the other. That was the logic, incidentally, behind the sale of Alaska: in the 1850s, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, the brother of Alexander II, argued that the Russian empire couldn’t hold its North American territory and that one day either Britain or the United States would simply take it, so why not sell it to them first? The same argument applies today to the 2,000 miles of the Russo–Chinese border. Given that even alcoholic Slavs with a life expectancy of 56 will live to see Vladivostok return to its old name of Haishenwei, Moscow might as well flog it to Beijing instead of just having it snaffled out from under.

That’s the danger for America — that most of what Russia has to trade is likely to be damaging to US interests. In its death throes, it could bequeath the world several new Muslim nations, a nuclear Middle East and a stronger China. In theory, America could do a belated follow-up to the Alaska deal and put in a bid for Siberia. But Russia’s calculation is that sooner or later we’ll be back in a bipolar world and that, in almost any scenario, there’s more advantage in being part of the non-American pole. A Sino–Russian strategic partnership has a certain logic to it, and so, in a darker way, does a Russo–Muslim alliance of convenience. In 1989, with the Warsaw Pact crumbling before his eyes, poor old Mikhail Gorbachev received a helpful bit of advice from the cocky young upstart on the block, the Ayatollah Khomeini: ‘I strongly urge that in breaking down the walls of Marxist fantasies you do not fall into the prison of the West and the Great Satan,’ wrote the pioneer Islamist nutcase. ‘I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system.’

In an odd way, that’s what happened everywhere but the Kremlin. As communism retreated, radical Islam seeped into Afghanistan and Indonesia and the Balkans. Crazy guys holed up in Philippine jungles and the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay which would have been ‘Marxist fantasists’ a generation or two back are now Islamists: it’s the ideology du jour. Even the otherwise perplexing enthusiasm of the western Left for the jihad’s misogynist homophobe theocrats is best understood as a latterday variation on the Hitler/Stalin pact. And, despite Gorbachev turning down the offer, it will be Russia’s fate to have large chunks of its turf annexed by the Islamic world.

We are witnessing a remarkable event: the death of a great nation not through war or devastation but through its inability to rouse itself from its own suicidal tendencies. The ‘ideological vacuum’ was mostly filled with a nihilist fatalism. Churchill got it wrong: Russia is a vacuum wrapped in a nullity inside an abyss.

I can wager whatever sum in hard cash that I know Russian history better than you ;))) You know it only from Kremlin briefings I suppose. My nation has Russian history etched on the skin of its back. Do you know that until 1989 all schoolchildren in my country were forced to learn Russian language and Russian literature and history at school? I bet you don't think it's something dreadful to learn Russian because you are free to choose. Think what would you feel if learning some language (let's say Norwegian) was compulsory in America? If you had to learn it 5 hours a week for 8 years, no matter if you wanted to or not? And what if the nation that forced you to learn its language was responsible was turning your country into a colony, murdering half of your untellectual elite and turning the rest into subjects?

I really do understand what happened but you cannot blame the long suffering Russians for the sins of the Commies. Remember Polish Commies played a major role in the oppression of Poland in all decades since the revolution.

The point is that until Russians honestly denounce the sins of their Empire no real understaning is possible. I do not blame ordinary Russians (read my comment no.151), I symphatize with the likes of Bukovski, Solzhenitsin, Yerofeev (read Moscow Petushki known in English as Moscow to the end of the line). But I hate the Russian arrogance and their stance: "we were communists' victims just like you and we have nothing to apologize you for" This attitude is something that I cannot stand. I could acknowledge that they were victims only after they acknowledge that they were the main perpetrators as well.

It's similar like with the Germans: yes, we can understand that Germans were also victims of Hitler, but it is only after Nuremberg trials and the confession of their guilt. What would you think if there was no Nuremberg after the war and Germans just struck peace deal in january 1945 and Hitler died in his bed, and then Germans told you: we were Hitler's victims, just like you, we have nothing to apologize for, Hitler killed those Jews, not we- but hands off this Czechoslovakia! Eh?

Remember Polish Commies played a major role in the oppression of Poland in all decades since the revolution.

Yes Polish commies played the role of Jewish police in the Ghetto, herding their compatriots into feightcars, while Germans watched.

------I hope your Latvian friend feels the same way about the Latvian Communists who were part of the Soviet Empire and war machine. ---
His atitude was that the Russians were pigs long before Communism and would remain pigs long after Communism vanished.

I would not admit to having such a sorry bigot for a friend. To condemn a nationality of people for the sins of a few is evil itself. Your friend sounds as if he has a very black heart.---

You're a piece of work! Latvia was under the Russian boot for almost 200 years until WWI and the Revolution loosened their grip. The Russians did their best to destroy the language and culture of this people.

Then the Russian Communists came back in 1940 took the country back, eventually drafting my friend into their Army. He escaped from his station in Siberia, eventually making his way to the United States at great risk to himself. He is fully entitled to his low opinion of Russians.

What gives you the right to make rash judgments about people you know nothing at all? People will think you a fool. I know I do.

>>>"Leo Tolstoy wrote about the Chechnian problems in the 1800's"

In a like manner, Winston Churchill wrote about the Sudan. Here's the first paragraph:

Link for some of the greatest writing around, you can download this free book by Winston Churchill, The River War: An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan.

"The north-eastern quarter of the continent of Africa is drained and watered by the Nile. Among and about the headstreams and tributaries of this mighty river lie the wide and fertile provinces of the Egyptian Soudan. Situated in the very centre of the land, these remote regions are on every side divided from the seas by five hundred miles of mountain, swamp, or desert. The great river is their only
means of growth, their only channel of progress. It is by the Nile alone that their commerce can reach the outer markets, or European civilisation can penetrate the inner darkness. The Soudan is joined to Egypt by the Nile, as a diver is connected with the surface by his air-pipe. Without it there is only suffocation. Aut Nilus, aut nihil!"

As Churchill described back in this 1902 book, the muslim north was enslaving those in the south. Today, it's the same 'ole same-oh.

The book can be downloaded free from Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4943

Euro-land is a cool mall....4 stories high, has a full soccer stadium and is about 4 blocks long in size. And guess what, the middle class are the main shoppers.

Moscow isn't (representative of) Russia and never has been. And that about "middle class"... in the middle of what is it situated? this kanook is off his rocker.

What, Steyn has his facts wrong, or what?

Yep. Its remarkable how swift Russia's decline has been since the Soviet Union came to an end in 1991. The country can barely hold itself together. And its greatest threat is its fast growing Islamic population. By the middle of the century, there will be fewer people alive in Russia than in France today. And its leaders have no idea how to arrest the impending specter of demographic death. If we look back through history, the only example that comes to mind is the decline of the Roman Empire in the West the middle of the fourth century until its formal extinction a century later. When a civilization starts losing hope in its own continued survival, then you can hear the Fat Lady singing. We thought we all imagined how the Cold War might end but no one imagined the century would get under with the Russians destroying themselves.

("Denny Crane: Gun Control? For Communists. She's a liberal. Can't hunt.")

It is Russia that is hellbent on a death wish, and we who are committed to life. Got that, now?

Are you discussing Steyn's article or fighting straw men? From his text, one can make a conclusion that Russia "is hellbent on a death wish", but nowhere does he compares her situation with the American.

The problem with many analysist is: 1. they live in yester-year and view things from that prism and 2. most talk about things they learn about from other analysts and so on, rather then going first person and finding things out for themselves.

That's not a problem at all. Just normal way of human learning: most of the things one knows, he knows second hand. Otherwise one would find himself with the extreme solipsists (usually they are 9 years old kids) who believe that only what you've seen or touched yourself is true or indeed exists. Or that anything you turn your back to immediately disappears (and comes into existence again when you face it).

Also, if one knows just the current situation, but not the history of the problem, one hardly deserves to be called an analyst.

Russia has almost paid off its foreign debt...

Well, Romania of Nikolae Chaushesku (spelling?) had paid it's foreign debt entirely, but starved to death millions on the way to this staggering achievment...

It is not too different for states, is it?

LOL!:) . Dear REactor, I suspected that most of your knowleges were taken from the Net, but i haven't suppose that your business are in so bad condition. The words Mark Twein said after a publication about his death in regional newspaper (familiar situation isn't it?") I bealive that for you as a Polish Patriot much more agreeably to read the article like this one but sometimes it is necessary to read classical literature. Best wishes. :)

"Dostoyevsky who hated Poles like dogs"

Don't His last name remind you anything? Dostoyevsky was a great russian writer with Polish roots. I guess that antipolish propoganda in Tsar Russia was so strong that Dostoyevsky started to hate his origins LOL.

Lev Tolstoy was extremly intelligent person suffice it to say that Hå learnt hebrew to read the Tora in original languege & read The Koran in translation. HE wasn't burden
with all kind of national phobia.

"Yet you couldn't find a nation that hates Russian politics more than Poles"

you said that you are russophobic it means that you hate exacly russians as a nation & Russia as a country. The policy is no the reason. So the reason is in the inferiority complex cause the The Poles always sure that They are the best nation at least in Europe but in real Russia always dominated & dominates Poland even now. AND you know, the word "phobia" from greek "Phobos" means "fear" simply you just afraid of Russia & Russians That is why Russians are not polonophobics cause there is no in Russia any person who is afraid of your country. More than that Russians like a lot of polish cultural workers more than any nation in the europe.

I guess, you have mortgage, some hire purchases etc. It's normal. Only filthy rich or crazy would buy everything cash or forcefully repay his debts causing enormous suffering for his family. I mean, debt is something positive, ability to incur it is an advantage... that's why you need a credit rating.

Russia now has a good credit rating, and her people are doing far better than they did under the communists. There is lots of food and merchandise on the shelves, and almost all have the ability to at least purchase the necessities.

But I hate the Russian arrogance and their stance: "we were communists' victims just like you and we have nothing to apologize you for" This attitude is something that I cannot stand. I could acknowledge that they were victims only after they acknowledge that they were the main perpetrators as well.

But the Russians were communist victims. Has Poland tried all communists who were guilty of crimes? If they haven't then they are every bit as guilty. Your German analogy is a farce, because the Germans really did not have any choice in the trials, those were instigated and held by the Allies. Once again, has Poland tried all communists who were guilty of crimes? Until you can answer in the affirmative, then you need to pull the log out of your eye prior to attempting to pull the splinter out of Russia's.

You're a piece of work! Latvia was under the Russian boot for almost 200 years until WWI and the Revolution loosened their grip. The Russians did their best to destroy the language and culture of this people.

You don't seem to grasp the Russians were under the boot of the communists. It was not the ordinary Russian on the street who subgated Latvia. Is that so hard for you to grasp, or are you likewise a bigot?

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