Paul Goble
Staunton, February 16 – Twenty-four percent of all deaths in Russia are among the working age population. Men form 80 percent of these deaths, Sergey Rybalchenko says; and that means that Russian men are dying at the same rate as Syrian men engaged in combat or affected by it.
The chairman of a Social Chamber commission on demography says that this is “an horrific situation” and must be “corrected,” something he argues will require not just improvements in the Russian medical systems but fundamental changes in Russia life
His observation is just one of many sparked by the rising death rate in Russia – on in which that country ranks sixth in the world in terms of premature deaths -- and the resulting decline in the Russian population (vtimes.io/2021/02/16/rossiya-zanimaet-shestoe-mesto-v-mire-po-izbitochnoi-smertnosti-a3207).
The extraordinarily high death rates among working-Russian males, the product of alcoholism, accidents, illness and suicide, are leading activists to focus on other groups in the Russian population which are also suffering from disproportionately high death rates, including in particular women who die at the hands of their partners.
The Consortium of Women’s NGOs reports this week that official figures show the number of Russian women who die as a result of violence inflicted by their partners is some 20 times greater than what the police are reporting and thus constitutes a plague and not the minor problem Moscow routinely insists it is (wcons.net/novosti/proekt-konsorciuma-zhenskih-npo-blizkim-licom-blizkomu-blicu-pobedil-v-hakatone-prozhektor-2021/).
Not only were almost two-thirds (61 percent) of all Russian women murdered in 2018 the victims of such violence, the group says; but official Rosstat figures show that the number of such deaths was 20 times what the interior ministry was reporting for the same year, something that casts doubt on the arguments of those who want to decriminalize violence within the family.
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