Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 13 – Moscow has
completely failed to address rising mortality rates in villages, the
traditional “demographic locomotive of Russia” and thus is threatening “the
depopulation of the entire country, according to Dmitry Zhuravlyev, director of
the Institute of Regional Problems.
While the central government has
taken steps to boost birthrates, it has not worked hard to reduce death rates
which now exceed the former. Instead, Zhuravlyev says, it has taken some steps
which have made the problem worse and failed to do anything about the many
other causes of this disaster (ng.ru/kartblansh/2020-09-13/3_7962_kartblansh.html).
On the one hand, it has in the name
of “optimization” made it more difficult for rural Russians to get the medical
care they need in a timely fashion. And on the other, and more seriously, it
has failed to address the underlying economic, cultural and behavioral problems
in rural Russia that have sent death
rates skyrocketing.
In Russia as in all other countries at
all times, the village has been the driver of demographic growth. If it ceases
to be that, the demographic future of the countries where that has happened has
been dire. That is explicable on the basis of both economic and cultural
factors, the regional expert says.
In
traditional village life, having more children not only helps increase
production (as well as covering the relatively higher death rates) but also is
typically viewed as something positive and a source of dignity especially for
men, Zhuravlyev continues. But modernization has changed these perspectives.
The
city has come to be viewed as the center of progress, and young people leave the
villages as soon as they can; and the costs of having children in the villages
have risen while the benefits of doing so have declined as agriculture has been
mechanized. Not surprisingly, birthrates which earlier were high have now
fallen.
Since
1992, the rural population of Russia has declined, the result of outmigration
and fewer births relative to a larger number of deaths. Moscow has sought to promote more births, but
it has done little or nothing to prevent more deaths in part because of
optimization and in part because it has failed to treat the issue in a
comprehensive fashion.
More
health care could help with some of the problems rural people suffer from but
far from all. It wouldn’t by itself stop suicides and accidents which account
for many of the deaths. Suicides arise “not because of illness but because of a
sense of hopelessness,” and accidents are often the product of alcoholism which
is a product of the same feelings.
If
these phenomena are to be addressed and reversed, the government must recognize
their social foundations and address those, something that Moscow has not done
perhaps in part because doing so is both extraordinarily complicated and even
more extraordinarily expensive compared to boosting birthrates.
“An
additional indication of the social roots or mortality in the village is
super-high mortality among men,” Zhuravlyev says. “Male mortality from external
causes is almost four times higher than among women,” and male deaths from many
diseases ranging from pulmonary to cancer is almost as excessive.
In
large part, the regional expert says, these health outcomes reflect “mass alcoholization”
of the male population, something that in turn reflects the sense of
desperation many men feel when confronted with the flight of young people to the
cities and with the demise of the old values which held the village together.
If the situation is to be improved, Zhuravlyev
says, rural residents are going to have to recover the conviction that they “will
live better in the future than they do now. that they are needed, will be
successful and respected.” At present the government is developing agriculture
by backing major producers. What it must do is support ordinary people.
If it doesn’t, Russia will suffer
demographic decline because the traditional source of demographic growth will
have been killed off.
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