Posted on 10/30/2005 11:04:36 AM PST by Dundee
Mark Steyn: Russia is dying and Islamists will grab parts of the carcass
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.
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 the US was flooding Russia with substandard chicken drumsticks and keeping the best ones for itself. It was a poultry complaint but indicative of a retreat into old-school Kremlin paranoia.
Russia's export of ideology was the decisive factor in the history of the 20th century. It seems to me entirely possible that the implosion of Russia could be the decisive factor in the 21st century.
As Iran's nuclear program suggests, in many of the geopolitical challenges to the US, there's usually a Russian component in the background.
In fairness to Putin, he's in a wretched position. 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.
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 but Russia is facing simultaneously a huge drain of wealth out of the system.
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. By 2010, AIDS will be killing between 250,000 and 750,000 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 parts of Russia that are exceptions to these malign trends. 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 Winston 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 supposedly secure public buildings in Nalchik that the Islamists took over with such ease two weeks ago. They also killed a big bunch of people.
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 knowhow, which a lot of ayatollahs and dictators are interested in.
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.
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.
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, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini: "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 except in 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, who would have been Marxist fantasists a generation or two back, are now Islamists: it's the ideology du jour. 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.
And what exctly does that mean if not a level of AIDS like that of Africa...except its not.
A rate of growth of cases in Russia roughly parallel to the historic rate of growth in Africa.
IOW, the raw number of cases isn't the particular concern, but the rate of growth in number of cases is.
Italy legalized abortion in 1981.
Russia legalized it in 1920
http://www.economist.com/countries/Italy/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3471736
Some history and facts
Russia Abortion
http://www.photius.com/countries/russia/society/russia_society_abortion.html
Sources: The Library of Congress Country Studies; CIA World Factbook
<< Back to Russia Society
http://www.photius.com/countries/russia/society/russia_society_abortion.html
With the exception of a few ethnic groups in the North Caucasus, birthrates for all nationalities in Russia have generally declined in the postwar period (see Ethnic Composition, ch. 4). Throughout the Soviet period, urbanization was rapid, and urban families generally had fewer children than rural ones. The urbanization process ended in 1992, when for the first time in the postwar period a smaller percentage of the Russian population lived in cities than the year before. By that time, however, substantial reasons existed for Russians to limit the size of their families. The population decline of the Russians has been especially pronounced in comparison with other ethnic groups. In many of the twenty-one republics, the titular nationalities have registered higher birthrates and larger average family sizes than the Russian populations.
The birthrate of Russians already was falling dramatically in the 1960s, moving from 23.2 per 1,000 population at the beginning of the decade to 14.1 in 1968. By 1983 the rate had recovered to 17.3 per 1,000, stimulated by a state program that provided incentives for larger families, including increased maternity benefits. Another decline in the birthrate began in 1987, and by 1993 the rate was only 9.4 per 1,000. According to the projections of the Center for Economic Analysis, after reaching its lowest point (8.0 per 1,000) in 1995, the birthrate will rise gradually to 9.7 per 1,000 in 2005.
In the turnaround year of 1992, the number of births in Russia dropped by 207,000 (13 percent) compared with 1991, and the number of deaths increased by 116,000 (7 percent). The fertility rate has dropped in both urban and rural areas. In the early 1990s, the lowest rates were in the northwest, especially St. Petersburg and in central European Russia. The disparity between birth and death rates was especially pronounced in the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg and in the European oblasts of Pskov, Tula, Tver', Belgorod, Leningrad, Novgorod, Yaroslavl', Moscow, Tambov, and Ivanovo. In 1992 natural population growth occurred only in the republics of Kalmykia, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, North Ossetia, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Gorno-Altay, Sakha, and Tyva, and in Tyumen' and Chita oblasts of western and eastern Siberia, respectively. However, although fertility rates in the predominantly Muslim republics of the North Caucasus and the Volga region continued to exceed those of the Slavic population, by 1995 the rate was declining even in Dagestan, the republic with the highest birthrate in Russia.
For Russians the total fertility rate, which is the average number of children a woman of childbearing age will have at current birthrates, fell from 2.0 in 1989 to 1.4 in 1993. The State Committee for Statistics (Goskomstat) estimates that the rate will decline further to 1.0 by the year 2000. Roughly half as many children were born in 1993 as in 1987. In 1994 the population of Russia fell by 920,000.
The sharp decline in the fertility rate in the 1990s was linked to the social and economic troubles triggered by the rapid transition to a market economy and resulting unemployment. Families have been destabilized, and living standards for many have fallen from even the modest levels of the Soviet era (see The Family, ch. 5). Under such circumstances, decisions on marriage and childbearing often are postponed. Particularly in the cities, housing has been extremely hard to acquire, and the percentage of working wives has increased significantly in the post-Soviet era (see The Role of Women, ch. 5). The number of common-law marriages, which produce fewer children than traditional marriages, has increased since the 1960s, as has the percentage of babies born to unattached women.
History also has affected the absolute number of births. The birthrate during World War II was very low, accounting for part of the low birthrate of females in the 1960s, which in turn lowered the rate in the 1990s. Between 1989 and 1993, the number of women in the prime childbearing age-group decreased by 1.3 million, or 12 percent, making a major contribution to the 27 percent decline in births during that period. Between 1990 and 1994, the government's official estimate of the infant mortality rate rose from 17.4 per 1,000 live births to 19.9, reflecting deterioration of Russia's child care and nutrition standards. But Russia has not used international viability standards for newborns, and one Western estimate placed the 1995 rate at 26.3. Between 1992 and 1995, the official maternal mortality rate also rose from forty-seven to fifty-two deaths per 100,000 births.
Abortion
Fertility in Russia has been adversely affected by the common practice of using abortion as a primary means of birth control. In 1920 the Soviet Union was the first country to legalize abortion. Sixteen years later it was prohibited, except in certain circumstances, to compensate for the millions of lives lost in the collectivization of agriculture and the widespread famine that followed in the 1930s. The practice was fully legalized once again in 1968, and an entire industry evolved offering abortion services and encouraging women to use them. Although abortions became easily available for most women, an estimated 15 percent of the Soviet total were performed illegally in private facilities. Because of the persistent lack of contraceptive devices in both Soviet and independent Russia (and the social taboo on discussion of contraception and sex in general, which continued in the 1990s), for most women abortion remains the only reliable method of avoiding unwanted pregnancy (see Health Conditions; Sexual Attitudes, ch. 5). Russia continues to have the highest abortion rate in the world, as did the Soviet Union. In the mid-1990s, the Russian average was 225 terminated pregnancies per 100 births and ninety-eight abortions for every 1,000 women of childbearing age per year--a yearly average of 3.5 million. An estimated one-quarter of maternal fatalities result from abortion procedures.
Data as of July 1996
Italy legalized abortion (1981
http://www.economist.com/countries/Italy/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3471736
1920 - Lenin legalized all abortions in the Soviet Union.
1936 - Joseph Stalin reversed Lenin's legalization of abortion in the Soviet Union to increase population growth.
Table 3.3
Officially Registered Induced Abortion on Demand in the Russian Federation, by Types of Abortion, 1970-1992*
http://www.rand.org/publications/CF/CF124/CF124.chap3.html
1970 1980 1985 1990 1991 1992
Total abortions (thousands) 4,670 4,506 4,415 3,920 3,442 3,531**
Early (mini) abortions (thousands) n.a. n.a n.a. 952 829 914
Abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-49 134.9 127.8 115.7 108.8 100.3 98.1
Abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-49 (early) n.a n.a. n.a 26.5 23.6 25.4
Abortions per 100 births 200.5 192.9 184.2 195.3 199.4 224.62
SOURCE: Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation (MZRF), 1993
NOTES: * Departmental statistics not included.
** Some departmental statistics included.
n.a. = No data available
Since the 1970s, Russia's decline in fertility was primarily accomplished by a very high abortion rate. Moreover, induced abortion in Russia has been used not only for birth limitation, but also for birth spacing. The substitution of abortion with effective methods of contraception has yet to take place on a large scale, and induced abortion is still the primary method of family planning in Russia. In addition, because abortion services remain inadequate, clandestine abortions are performed at a very high rate.
The issue of induced abortion in Russia may be viewed not only as a national problem, but also as an extreme case relevant to world-wide population policy discourse. Russia can be used as a model of what happens when information, services, and contraception are unavailable or inadequate. A system of family planning services has yet to be created in Russia. It is one of the few economically developed countries where abortion still prevails over the use of contraceptives in family planning. The difference between Russia and all Western countries lies not only in this temporal lag, but also in the continuing and widespread underestimation of this as a social problem for Russia.
Nevertheless, we expect a deterioration in the situation[15] as a result of the problem of AIDS and great changes in sexual behavior (especially among the young), changing demographics, and increasing democratization in Russian society.
Basic Health Indicators: (information from WHO, 2002)
http://missinglink.ucsf.edu/lm/russia_guide/Russianhealth2.htm
Population: 144,082,000
GDP per capita: $8,486
Life expectancy at birth: 64.8 years - 58.4 (men); 72.1 (women)
Population growth 1992-2002: -0.3; fertility rate 1.2
An Abortion? What's the Big Deal?
By Anna Arutunyan The Moscow News
31.10.05
With Russia's abortion rate the highest in the world, is a lackadaisical attitude towards this phenomenon another attribute of the "enigmatic Russian soul?"
http://english.mn.ru/english/issue.php?2004-45-26
According to a compilation from the Demographic Yearbook of the European Council and an analogous Demographic Yearbook by the United Nations, Russia is the only nation in the world where abortions consistently outnumber live births by a ratio of about 2 to 1. In 1970, for example, there were only 1.9 million births and 4.8 million abortions.
Voluntary Surgical Sterilization in Post-Soviet Russia of the Early 1990s
Voluntary surgical contraceptive sterilization was legalized in the USSR in the early 1990s. Earlier such sterilization was strictly prohibited in the USSR pursuant to Stalin's prohibition of abortion.[10] During that time, numerous policies were introduced to curtail individual reproductive freedom and increase fertility. During the 60 years between the end of the 1930s and the early 1990s, this method of sterilization was not officially recognized and, as a result, was considered to be clandestine. Contraceptive sterilization could be obtained by payment ("under the table") or through an "acquaintance" only.
The prohibition of voluntary surgical contraceptive sterilization extended until 1990, when the Order of the Ministry of Health of the USSR No. 484, "On permission for surgical sterilization of women," was published.[11] However, judging by personal communications with practicing physicians in the larger cities of the former USSR, this method was very rarely used for contraception in the early 1990s.
Is it complacency among most Russians these days that keeps Putin's group in power or the same old rule-with-an-iron-fist tactics? I think it's complacency. But I think things could change. just not everywhere in Russia at once. I think the Russia's biggest problem is that it's just too darn big.
Right....
We proud our territory and military traditions. Probably like no one Russian ppl have empire spirit but it never went out with aggression against other country. Now Russians actually young generation admires Putin and his politic course You should watch recent Russian blockbuster "9 Rota" which beated all records in Russia. Movie is about Afganistanian war
Uhhhm, yea. The chinese are also not doing well when you apply those same set of standards to them!
Did you know that China also has a very Serious problem with Islamic insurgency in it's western provences? You don't hear about it much because it is covered up by the Chinese Communist party. This is the "Offical" reasoning behind the Shanghai Coorperative Organization. Also, both countries have growing internal dissent, according to the MSM.
At the same time, Russia and China arm Iran and Syria. Very stupid on their part
It seems to me that Russia (or a major part of it) is bound to improve in terms of standard of living, birth rate, etc, for those reasons alone.
Yes, and 3 years ago it was 56 for males, welcome to the come back. Instead of taking a snap shot and finding all the negatives, its wiser to follow trends.
Frankly, we, here in the US, have some of the world's most leftist abortion laws.
Its the fact that the 6 years of his reign the country is growing, government workers are paid (including back wages), the unemployment rate is 7.9% (lower then most of europe: Germany 12.5%, France 11%, Poland 19%), foreign factories are flooding into the country, the Chechens are down to a few large attacks a year (the last was a total failure where they lost 5 men for every Russian killed), taxes are low (our are absolutely communist in comparison). Other then that, must be their lack of desire to return to the "freedom" of Yeltsin when they were economically raped every day while the Yeltsin intelligencia told them how stupid they were every day.
But you use your own judgement as to why.
You do realize that most of the fighting in Chechnya is now between pro-Russian Chechens and Islamics, right?
IMDB says "9 Rota" stars Fyodor Bondarchuk. Any relation to Natalya Bondarchuk, who co-starred in Solyaris?
I guess that doesn't include anyone from the Russian government or armed forces at all, either up front or behind the scenes. Either way, it's a mess.
Nope, can't argue with that.
Mother
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