Staunton,
January 19 – The leader of the Russians Foundation has written to Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin urging him to establish a special ministry for
demographic development to deal with the country’s demographic decline,
migration, and support for compatriots living outside of the Russian Federation.
The
Marker.ru news agency reported yesterday that Leonid Shershenev, in a letter
signed by other ethnic Russian leaders, told the premier that “only the
establishment of a new state organ will be able to solve the problems of
emigration and the continuing reduction in the size of the Russian population”
(marker.ru/news/512239).
In the
letter, Shershenev also said that in his opinion, there was no need to restore
the ministry for nationality affairs which simply “lobbied for the interests of the leaderships of
national minorities to the harm of the broad strata of the population” and
“never even once” discussed the demographic problems of the Russian nation.”
A Ministry for
Demographic Development, the foundation head continued, would be different. Its
departments would oversee the government’s “demographic policy” and would
develop a state “concept” to ensure not only a common approach of all agencies
but also progress in turning Russia’s demographic situation around
Shershenev is not the first to make this
argument, the news agency reported. Seven years ago, it said, “Igor
Beloborodov, the director of the Moscow Institute of Demographic Research, made
the same proposal, and recently, he even posted this idea on the prime
minister’s website And deputies from
Just Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party have advanced similar ideas
Beloborodov
told Marker.ru that Russia has “the largest indicator of population decline” of
any country in the world and complained that despite pledges by the country’s
leaders to do something about this, “there have not been any administrative
actions for the resolution of the problems.”
As a result, he
continued, the various agencies involved with population questions do so in an
uncoordinated fashion and only as a secondary issue to their primary
responsibilities.” As a result, one cannot speak of a genuine state policy in
this critical area, a situation that he said “should not be the case.”
“But
not all experts consider that the creation of a new state agency would solve
the problem of the reduction in the number of Russians,” the news agency says. Some think its creation would only “increase the number of bureaucrats,”
without having any impact on the underlying forces at work
Elena
Tyuryukanova, a scholar at the Moscow Institute of Social-Economic Problems of
Population, for example, opposes creating such a ministry. “In order to come up
with a conception of demographic development, it isn’t necessary to create a
ministry.” Indeed, Russia already has such a concept paper.” Setting up a new
ministry wouldn’t change anything.
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