Russia, the sick man of Europe

Public Interest, Wntr, 2005 by Nicholas Eberstadt

The politics of depopulation

Russia's political leaders are by no means incognizant of the demographic vise gripping their nation. The country's politicians and policy makers talk about the nation's population constantly. However, Moscow has done almost nothing worth mentioning to reverse the demographic catastrophe that has been unfolding on Russian soil over the past decade.

To the extent that Russian policy makers have concerned themselves with the country's negative natural increase problem, they have focused almost entirely upon the birth rate--and how to raise it. Not surprisingly, this pro-natalist impulse has foundered on the shoals of finance. In plain terms, serious pro-natalism is an expensive business, especially when the potential parents-to-be are educated, urbanized women accustomed to careers with paid recompense. To induce a serious and sustained increase in childbearing, a government under such circumstances must be prepared to get into the business of hiring women to be mothers--and this is a proposition that could make the funding of a national pension system look like pin money by comparison. Consequently, Russia's government has concentrated most of its pro-natalist efforts on attempting to "talk the birth rate up"--and as a century of experience with such official chatter in Western countries will attest, that gambit is almost always utterly ineffectual.

In 2003, the Russian government began experimenting with another variant of "pro-natalism on the cheap": a quiet attempt to restrict the previously unconditional availability of abortion on demand. There are, of course, ethical reasons for opposition to the promiscuous destruction of fetuses. But from a strictly demographic standpoint, the dividends derived from a slight and gradual tightening of the rules on pregnancy termination are distinctly limited.

Reducing the number of abortions, after all, does not mechanistically increase birth totals. If it did, there should have been a baby-boom in post-Communist Russia. (Remember: Russia had about three million fewer abortions in 2002 than in 1987--but also about a million fewer births.) To the extent that Russia's tentative steps toward the regulation of abortion may be seen as a factor boosting the nation's fertility, the effect would largely be felt through the eventual enhancement of fecundity--which is to say, fewer Russian women would be rendered involuntarily sterile through such procedures in the years ahead. But in the greater scheme of things, that could hardly be described as much of a stimulus.

While Russian policy circles trained their attention on a literally fruitless and largely misdirected effort to revitalize the birth rate, they treated the country's catastrophic mortality conditions--upon which sustained interventions would have yielded some predictable results--with an insouciance verging on indifference. Indeed, Russian authorities have adopted a remarkably laissez-faire posture toward the calamitous conditions that currently lead to the "excess mortality" of something like 400,000 of their citizens each year.