Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 29 – Even if the
recent much-ballyhooed rise in Russian fertility rate were to last and that is almost
certainly impossible, a Moscow State University demographer says, the
population of the country would decline by half over the next 50 years. In
fact, it is likely to decline further and faster than that.
In an interview
posted by Stoletiye.ru yesterday, Anatoly Antonov notes that fertility rates in
Russia stood at 1.2 children per woman in 1992, rose to 1.4 in 2007-2008, and
now stand at “approximately 1.6.” That
has given rise to much optimism, but that optimism is misplaced (stoletie.ru/obschestvo/anatolij_antonov_sudba_gosudarstva_zavisit_ot_demografii_480.htm).
On
the one hand, he points out, if the current level were to be maintained, that
would mean that the country’s population would be only half the size it is now
in half a century. And on the other, if
it falls back toward a level of 1.1 as current trends suggest, that halving of
the country’s population will take only 25 years.
What
makes these conclusions worth noting is that they come from a scholar who has
long been identified as a Russian nationalist rather than from researchers who
are more liberal and are often dismissed because of it and that Antonov’s words
appear on a portal directed at Russian nationalists rather than the academic
community.
They
are thus far more likely to spark new debates about what Moscow should do and
also about the limits of state policy in this sphere both immediately and over
the longer term and become part of the Russian nationalist indictment of
Vladimir Putin, an attack that many commentators thought the Kremlin would not
have to face from that direction.
Antonov
points out that the current uptick is the echo of the rise in birthrates at the
end of Soviet times which has led to a larger number of women in the prime childbearing
ages now. That increase in the size of this cohort relative to all Russian
women rather than the introduction by Putin of “maternal capital” incentives is
responsible for the increase.
And
because the number of women in that age cohort is set to fall by 50 percent over
the next decade, from approximately 14 million to seven million, the Russian fertility
rate, a statistical artefact of the age structure of the population, is going
to fall as well, unless something totally unexpected happens, Antonov says.
That
trend is being exacerbated by the
declining quality and availability of health care in the Russian Federation in
the Putin years and by the government’s unwillingness to invest funds in this
sector or in increasing family incentives to European levels, which would
require a 1000 percent increase in such spending.
It will be still worse, he adds, because Russia women who
will be entering the prime childbearing cohort are even less disposed to have
two children than are those in it now, a reflection of the different
expectations about family size the two groups received from their parents.
The
size of the Russian population is also going to be affected by continuing and
in some areas rising rates of adult male morbidity and mortality, he says. No
one in the 1980s would have predicted that male life expectancy at birth among
Russians would fall to 58 years or that it would not quickly rebound. There has been some improvement but not
enough.
Antonov
said that he personally believes that “people who understand that the fate of
the state depends on demography will come to power by 2025-2030.” That
successor government will have its work cut out for it because if Russia can’t
at least maintain its current population, “the Russian state will collapse.”
That
regime, he continues, will promote the image of larger families by promoting
stay-at-home motherhood and raising the wages and salaries of men to a level
that will allow them to support such families in comfortable homes. Some
conservatives want one of these things but do not understand that both are
required. Unless they do, Russia’s demographic future is bleak.
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