Five Disturbing Demographic Developments in Russia Countrywide Statistics Aren’t Capturing

Paul Goble

            Staunton, October 16 – In Soviet times, both Russian and Western analysts knew that Moscow’s statistics were either so incomplete or falsified that those who wished to understand what was going on had to look to specific cases because the media then did cover important developments on the principle that journalists could “criticize but not generalize.”

            Now, in Putin’s times, many both in Moscow and the West dismiss such stories as “anecdotal.”  If there aren’t statistics gathered by Rosstat or polling agencies, they aren’t nearly as interested as they used to be in considering what they mean.  As a result, many particular developments that tell a larger story are ignored or downplayed.

            Five such stories appeared in Russia this week, each of which deserves to be taken seriously:

·         Russians Killed in Military Conflicts Now Being Buried in Graves without Names.  Ekho Rossii reports that near St. Petersburg, where there is a center which processes combat losses, there is a cemetery in which many gravestones include not the name of the individual interred but only a number, presumably to avoid attracting attention to this mounting problem (ehorussia.com/new/node/17175).

·         New List of Combat Deaths in Ukraine and Syria Includes 4569 Names.  The Znak news agency reports that a list of combat deaths in two of Putin’s wars that is circulating on the Internet includes 4569 names with details on many of them.  The list, it suggests, is more compete than anything published earlier by the government or watchdog groups (znak.com/2018-10-16/opublikovan_novyy_spisok_iz_4569_dobrovolcev_i_naemnikov_pogibshih_v_sirii_i_na_ukraine).

·         43 Percent of Russian Men Won’t Live to New Pension Age.  According to the World Bank, nearly half of all Russian men will now die before they can collect their pensions, a figure more typical of sub-Saharan Africa than of the Wester countries Russians prefer to compare themselves to (rusmonitor.com/43-rossijjskikh-muzhchin-ne-dozhivayut-do-65-i-let.html).

·         Putin’s Health Optimization Program Means Life Expectancy in Rural Russia Falling Ever Further Behind That of Urban Residents.  According to a new Higher School of Economics Study, rural Russians live on average two years less than do urban ones, a gap that will only increase as a result of the Kremlin’s decision to shut down hospitals and medical points in many rural areas, leaving people there without access to medical care (iq.hse.ru/news/225872667.html).

·         HIV Infections Increasingly Common Among Middle-Aged Russians. Until recently, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Russia hit mostly people under the age of 35; but now, according to data from the Urals, more than one in every ten people identified as infected is over the age of 50.  That appears to be less the result of improved survival of those who contracted the disease earlier than of changes in social behavior and of the increasing spread of HIV/AIDS by heterosexual contact (ura.news/news/1052355364).