Russia Is Disappearing! What Will It Mean?

Between 1976 and 1991, the last sixteen years of Soviet power, the country recorded 36 million births. In the sixteen post-Communist years of 1992–2007, there were just 22.3 million, a drop in childbearing of nearly 40 percent from one era to the next. On the other side of the life cycle, a total of 24.6 million deaths were recorded between 1976 and 1991, while in the first sixteen years of the post-Communist period the Russian Federation tallied 34.7 million deaths, a rise of just over 40 percent. The symmetry is striking: in the last sixteen years of the Communist era, births exceeded deaths in Russia by 11.4 million; in the first sixteen years of the post-Soviet era, deaths exceeded births by 12.4 million. _WorldAffairs_via_ArtsLettersDaily

Why focus on Russia's depopulation problem when Japan, Spain, Italy, Germany, and other developed and somewhat developed nations of the world are experiencing the same thing? Because Russia is particularly belligerent toward the entire world -- particularly its neighbors -- and because Russia is actively building more accurate missiles and more durable nuclear warheads. Russia is attempting to develop nanotechnology almost exclusively for its weapons potential. Russia has a potent chemical and biological weapons arsenal. And as evidenced by Russia's particular methods of self - implosion, Russia is only half - civilised, which means that Russia has no particular scruples in how it will use whatever violence projection methods it can develop and maintain.

Russia's population is slipping through the cracks of time and space, withering into a long dark winter.

Strikingly, and perhaps paradoxically, Moscow’s leadership is advancing into this uncertain terrain not only with insouciance but with highly ambitious goals. In late 2007, for example, the Kremlin outlined the objective of achieving and maintaining an average annual pace of economic growth in the decades ahead on the order of nearly 7 percent a year: on this path, according to Russian officials, GDP will quadruple in the next two decades, and the Russian Federation will emerge as the world’s fifth largest economy by 2020.

But history offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline. It seems highly unlikely that such an ambitious agenda can be achieved in the face of Russia’s current demographic crisis. Sooner or later, Russian leadership will have to acknowledge that these daunting long-term developments are shrinking their country’s social and political potential. _WAJ

Westerners need to be concerned about Russia's simultaneous megalomaniacal delusions of grandeur in combination with the striking disappearance of people from the half-western, half-eastern, frontier nation of vodka-HIV-TB, authoritarianism, and strong nihilist undercurrents.

...to date, no European society that has embarked upon the same demographic transition as Russia’s—declining marriage rates with rising divorce; the spread of cohabitation as alternative to marriage; delayed age at marriage and sub-replacement fertility regimens—has reverted to more “traditional” family patterns and higher levels of completed family size. There is no reason to think that in Russia it will be any different.

...Putin’s Kremlin made a fateful bet that natural resources—oil, gas, and other extractive saleable commodities—would be the springboard for the restoration of Moscow’s influence as a great power on the world stage. In this gamble, Russian authorities have mainly ignored the nation’s human resource crisis. During the boom years—Russia’s per capita income roughly doubled between 1998 and 2007—the country’s death rate barely budged. Very much worse may lie ahead. How Russia’s still-unfolding demographic disaster will affect the country’s domestic political situation—and its international security posture—are questions that remain to be answered. _WAJ

A realist will have long since understood that Russia's trajectory is set. The main question is how Russia will handle its death throes. Will it unleash a flight of missiles in a last gasp attempt at leaving a legacy of Russian greatness? Or will it settle quietly into its self-made grave, wrapping its death robe about it for the long sleep?

More likely the former, or any other method of striking out against anyone who may have given slight or offense to Russia. The subtext of envious vengefulness runs deep in the Russian character. With nothing to lose, it is likely the dying nation will attempt to take its enemies with it.

So it is puzzling to watch President Obama toadying to the dying husk of a nation, making obeisance to the threat of violence that Russia represents -- offering to disarm the world hegemon as a gesture of trust to the untrustworthy. One can only hope that such Dear Leaders as Obama will only occupy the world stage for a short time. Such arrogant naifs can only make the underlying chaos immeasurably worse.