By Boris Kagarlitsky
MOSCOW — Every day, there are fewer people in Russia. The country has been seized by an unprecedented demographic decline. For the first time since the second world war, the number of deaths substantially exceeds the number of births.
It might be argued that a lessening of population pressures on the much-abused Russian environment is to be welcomed. Most of Russia, however, is quite sparsely populated, and the ecological havoc is not the fault of the great majority of its people.
The fall in the population is both a symptom of the current crisis and a dramatic testimony to its severity. Average male life expectancy in Russia today is around 60 years. This means that the average male in Indonesia, the Philippines and even some African countries lives longer than his Russian counterpart.
According to the March 6 New York Times, mortality levels among adults in Yeltsin's Russia are already substantially higher than in Pakistan and Bangladesh. The population of urban areas in Russia fell by 175,000 in 1992, and in 1993 the population of the country as a whole declined by 611,000. In effect, we are losing an average-sized provincial capital every year.
The number of suicides has risen to 88 per million deaths, and suicides now account for almost a third of deaths from "unnatural" causes. The number of murders has more than doubled. As well as the traditional accidents on the job, the number of which has grown as privatisation has accelerated, we are now suffering a high incidence of poisoning by adulterated food products and low-grade spirits.
Finally, the years of "reform" have also brought increases in almost all types of "natural" mortality, including heart and arterial diseases, hypertensive diseases, tuberculosis (up almost a third), cirrhosis of the liver, stomach ulcers and sugar diabetes. The causes here are largely social; the health system is collapsing, and the cost of medicines has risen dramatically.
A partial "compensation" for the increased death rates is the flood of refugees from other countries of the former Soviet Union. Official forecasts put their number at 3.7 million by the year 2000.
While mortality rates in 1993 rose by 20%, birthrates fell by 15%. The fact that birthrates are declining is not in itself remarkable. A similar process has taken place in all industrialised countries, and was occurring in the USSR. But, at least in peacetime, this fall has never been as abrupt as in Russia during recent years.
The only exception is also from our history. During the Stalinist repression and collectivisation in the 1930s, the population shrank not just because of the millions of deaths in the camps, but also from "natural" losses. Despite all the protestations about the goal of "overcoming Stalinisation", the architects of market reform achieved the same results in the field of demographic policy as the organisers of the Stalinist repression.
If we match the population statistics against economic and political processes, everything falls into place. The birthrate went into a steady decline from 1988, when the politics of perestroika entered the phase of glasnost. This was a disturbing symptom, but so far nothing catastrophic had happened. Mortality remained stable, and the fall in the birthrate could be explained as the result of "deferred births". In conditions of crisis, people were in no hurry to bear children, but they had not yet despaired.
The fall in the birthrate continued throughout the rest of the Gorbachev period, but simultaneously with the fall of the USSR in 1991, the death rate grew rapidly. If Gorbachev goes down in history as the ruler under whom the people of Russia preferred not to have children, Yeltsin will be remembered as the leader whose subjects simply began dying out.
By the end of 1993 the population of Russia had fallen to 148.4 million people. Demographers predict that unless the situation changes, by the year 2017 there will be only 139 million of us.
The main question, of course, is not how many of us there are, but how we are going to live. Unless the present social and economic trends are altered, the people who are lucky enough to survive until 2017 will celebrate the centenary of the October Revolution in a country more reminiscent of Bangladesh or Pakistan than of the land of "heavenly pleasures" promised to us by the ideologues of reform.