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.

vox_PL has a very selective and chauvinistic view of history. When Poland attacked its neighbors, well it was manifest destiny and good...when those neighbors returned fire it was because they are uncivilized savages (except the Germans for whom he will say not a single bad word, regardless they actually tried to exterminate the Poles....must be because the Germans are paying for the Polish welfare state of 19% unemployment).==

You got it precisely:). Cheers!

Vox_PL remembers only wrongs done to Poland. The polish wrong-doings he excuses at blink.
He forgets that Poland always started hostilities.

In 17 century it was Poland who FIRST came to Moscow and occupied it. Then Russia returned this visit in 18-19 centuries and cameto Warsaw and destroyed Poland.

In 1920th it was new founded Poland started with killings of soviet POWS by hunger, deceases and beatings in polish concentration camps.
Later Soviet Union retaliated in 1940 and executed polish officers in Katyn. Regretable thing but let us remember who started killings of POWS.

In 1938 it was Poland who participated in splitting of Checkoslovakia with Hitler' Germany. In next year Poland was splitted herself by same Hitler' Germany and USSR. But how its hypocritical for poles to complain if just one year before Poland herself did same thing.

He will counter by saying they were only regaining Polish populated lands in Czech, of course the fact that the Soviets only took Ukrainian and Belaruss occupied lands from Poland, he'll forget. Welcome to the wide wide world of hypocracy.

I see we should build a high wall on our borders with Russia. ==

Go ahead:).

Your vision of world is trully one-sided. You remember wrong done to Poland but you forget that poluish wrongdoings.

Any unbiased man may check date of polish invasion to Moscow then check date of first russian invasion to Warsaw. And he will find that poles did it FIRST.
Disprove it if you can:).

=I see we should build a high wall on our borders with Russia. ==

That's a metaphor, A METAPHORE!!!!!

But this is too difficult to understand for a small Russian brain.===

No:)) I really and honestly thought you will carry the trains of bricks or concrete slabs on your border and began to mason your dear wall alike as Berlin wall:))))))))

Are you really that stupid and just pretend to be?:))

I will tell you one anectdote which may illustrate above question. I was told once in pub when was living in America.

Two poles meet. One say to another: "You know Marek our mutual friend John has two assholes."
Marek answer: "How so Zbishek?".
"Remember yestoday when we walked with him down the street I heard someone said behind our backs. "Here goes John with two assholes."" Bhahahah:))

Oh well. It's sad but I will call anyone out for making a blanket statement as he did. As I said, I am Russian by blood and I know plenty of Russians. I haven't yet met one that is "pure evil". I have met some that are damaged from having lived for years under Soviet rule but that's the monority. Most are good, decent and hard working - and most importantly, God-loving Orthodox people.

My maternal grandfather was pure German. He went to the Theological institute in Belgrade after converting to Orthodoxy from Lutheranism. It was there he met my grandmother, who was also a student there (the first woman to graduate, in fact).

They married and returned to Germany. They lived in Berlin and then Potsdam, where he had his parish church (in the "Russian Village" in Potsdam). Near the end of WWII he was taken away by the Soviets and put into a concentration camp and eventually murdered - because he was a Russian Orthodox priest who was kind and good to everyone. He spoke out against the Nazi's AND the Communists. He was not murdered by Russians, but Soviets. As I said before and will keep on saying, there is a HUGE difference between the two. I don't thnk that our friend undertands this. A lot of people don't and they're wrong.

"But this is too difficult to understand for a small Russian brain."

Once in a while folks, will you knock off your stupid ethnic/national slurs or jokes, and try to see individuals behind nationalities or ethnicities ?

Yes it's sad that Russia is still didn't transform itself into a genuienly law abiding country respecting its neighbors, and many E. Europeans fear the Russia precisely because of that. But hatred of all people because of their ethnicity or nationality is amoral--nobody chooses his/her place of birth, ethnicity, national origin, race, etc.

I reject ideology of Russian imperialism--Russia as a state must respect its neighbors independence and territorial integrity and not to whitewash the crimes committed by USSR or Russian Empire. However, I also without hesitation reject when somebody is attacked simply for being Russian. It's amoral to disrespect people because of their ethnicity or national origin.

Don't wanna disturb you but UKRAINE. Yes. Ask any citizen (exception with Lvov or Ivano - Frankovsk districts)which country they sympathize with, there is no doubt the answer will be - Russia. With most neighbouring country RF has a good relations i will not enumerate them cause it was already done. About Finland. Russians like Finns as they still like Poles, but with Finns its reciprocally.

That was when Hitler thought he could get Poland as an ally to allow him to pass through to the Russian border.

Two evils make a good, eh? Excellent logic pal!

But what does it change in the baseness of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?

Molotov wasn't russian.

Vanjusha, cut the crap, will you? One of your buddies here answers the question about Vladimir-Suzdal as follows:

Vladimir-Suzdal Great Principality is a successor of Kiev Great Principality and a predecessor of Moscow Great Principality. Moscow Principality gathered all Russian Principalities and became the whole Russia. Ivan IV the Terrible was the last Great Prince of Moscow Principality and the first Russian Tsar.

So if you acknowledge this political inheritance, you can't throw away the rest of it... Ivan the Terrible, Koba the Terrible, his servant Molotov, and Vlad the KGB-man are all equally Russian, their ethnicity and party allegiance notwithstanding.

Once again, your propaganda is too primitive. Save it for retarded young neo-Nazis of Stalingrad...

Polish-Ukrainian War 1918

Nice try, but there is no such beast as Polish-Ukrainian War... You better not begin about the Ukrainian Marshal Tukhachevski... or Marshal Rokossovski of the WW2.

All your efforts to rewrite history in apologetic for the bandit entity of the Soviet Union way are doomed.

HE WAS RUSSIAN, SINCE HE SPOKE RUSSIAN AND LIVED IN RUSSIA.

Of course he was... and jb6, RussIvan and the rest of the Soviet Agitprop brigade here do know that. But they'll try to acknowledge those parts of their own political history that suit them, and somehow to deny those that don't.

That is why they claim Vladimir-Suzdal and other principalities to be predecessors of the contemporary Mother Russia, but (in accordance with RusIvan) Molotov wasn't Russian, and now Felix Dzerzhinski wasn't too (in accordance with jb6).

It's not hypocrisy. No. It's training they receive in their party or state security schools: to repeat a lie again and again in hope that after a while it will sound like truth. At least to some.

And these people know no shame. Caught red-handed, they'll continue to mumble the same tired lies, driving you crazy... this is their ultimate aim. In anger you'd just quit any contacts with them, and, left alone, they'll claim intellectual victory. And receive the commendation from the headquarters.

In 1939 Russia did not exist. As I have said before there is a huge difference between SOVIETS and Russians.

A nation can't recognize only that part of its political history and inheritance which suits it aims or just flatter its self-esteem.

Soviets inherited Russia, Russians inherited Soviets in their entirety. Surely, you like Tolstoy and dislike Iron Felix, but you can't have one and thrust another to someone else. Is it clear?

According vox_PL logic everyone who live in America and speak english are americans:).

Your smiley in the end of the phrase is totally inappropriate. Though you used the statement sarcastically, it is exactly true!

There are, of course, the so called "hyphenated" Americans - for instance, Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, Polish-Americans and so on - but all of them are first and foremost Americans. The greatness of America clearly shows in this fact. And your failure to understand it clearly shows your true colours of a petty chauvinist...

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