100 Million Fewer People Will Speak Russian Next Year than Did in 1990, Arefyev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 24 – Vladimir Putin has made promotion of “the Russian world” the centerpiece of his ideological agenda, and he has made the Russian language the defining characteristic of that world. But if that is the metric used, figures show that he and his world aren’t doing very well.

            According to Aleksandr Arefyev, a scholar at the Moscow Institute of Sociology, the number of people in Russia and around the world who speak Russia has been falling for the last 30 years and will continue to decline because of demographic problems at home and image problems abroad (baikal-journal.ru/2024/01/23/putin-i-russkij-yazyk-vsyo-taki-raznye-veshhi/).

            In 1990, the year before the Soviet Union collapsed, 321 million people in the USSR and around the world spoke Russian, the sociologist says. As of 2023, that figure had declined to 255 million; and by next year, it is likely to be only 215 million, 106 million or a third less than it was only a generation ago.

            While the Kremlin is doing what it can to promote Russian within the country by undermining non-Russian languages, the declining  number of ethnic Russians helps to explain this decline. But the big fall-offs have come in countries that achieved their independence in 1991 or in others where the Russian language is a less attractive choice.

            During the Cold War, many learned Russian to know the language of the enemy and thus to participate in the fight against Soviet expansionism. But that motivation has declined. And Moscow’s new aggressiveness has meant that even those interested in classical Russian literature are less willing to devote the time to learning Russian than they once did.

            According to some reports assembled by Karina Pronina, a People of Baikal journalist, Moscow has in fact made the problem still further by slashing funding for Russian language instruction abroad that it had earlier supported and by using textbooks which are so out of date that they use Soviet terminology, something that inevitably raises questions and puts people off.

Rising Death Toll in Ukraine War, from Lack of Heat and from Lack of Medicines Prompts Some to Say Putin is ‘Optimizing Russian People’

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 24 – The collapse of communal services, the inability of the Russian government to ensure adequate supplies of medicines, and the rising death toll from the fighting in Ukraine is sparking anger among Russians and leading some of them to suggest that Putin is “optimizing” their number as he earlier “optimized,” that is cut, schools and healthcare facilities.

            As a result, the editors of the To Be Continued portal say, the policies behind these three developments represent “an enormous mistake by Putin in advance of the elections,” because while people may support the Kremlin leader’s policies against the West, they aren’t happy about policies that hit them where they live (prosleduet.media/details/2024-01-22-freezing-russia/).

            Putin is banking that patriotic enthusiasm for his war in Ukraine will define how Russians view him; and up to now, there is some evidence that this is the case. But as Russians see what Putin’s policies there and elsewhere mean for their lives, they are likely to connect the dots and turn on him, the portal suggests.

            The longer the war goes on and the more the Russian people are asked to sacrifice not only in the form of higher taxes but in suffering as a result of communal service collapses, the more Russians will do so, something that is surely on Putin’s mind and may explain why he has  stepped up the pace of the war in Ukraine at a time Russians are feeling the pinch at home.   

 

Since Putin Began Expanded War in Ukraine, Consumer Prices in Russia Risen by More than 50 Percent, ‘Romir’ Data Show

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 23 – Despite Kremlin claims that it has inflation under control, the Romir news agency, which monitors economic developments in Russia, says that consumer prices in Russia have risen by 56.9 percent since February 2022 when Vladimir Putin launched his expanded invasion of Ukraine.

            That means, the agency says, that prices have more than doubled over the last five years as a whole, figures far worse than those Rosstat, the Russian government’s statistical arm has announced, but that help to explain both the anger of Russian consumers and the behavior of Russia’s Central Bank, Krizis-Kopilka says (krizis-kopilka.ru/archives/101621).

            The portal which tracks problems in Russia says that the Central Bank is desperately trying to bring inflation under control in advance of the March 2024 elections; but it cites the conclusion of Aleksandr Prokopenko, a research fellow at the Carnegie Berlin Center, that this won’t happen.

            “Officials,” she says, like firefighters with a bucket of water rush from fire to fire; but they can’t repeal the laws of economics [and] it is impossible to spend trillions on military operations, project economic growth based on injections from the budget, and keep prices stable at one and the same time.”

 

Since February 2022, More than 400 Military and Transportation Facilities in Russia has Been Attacked, Interior Ministry Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 23 – Since the beginning of the expanded Russian military action in Ukraine in February 2022, a senior official of the Russian interior ministry says, individuals have attacked 220 military commissariats and 184 facilities of various kinds along the country’s railroad network.

            According to Stanislav Kolesnik, deputy head of the ministry’s Chief Administration for Ensuring Public Order, the authorities have solved more than 80 percent of the attacks on military commissariats and on railways and determined that young people were far more likely to be involved with attacks on the latter than the former (tass.ru/obschestvo/19782695).

            In most cases, he continued, the amount of damage has been minimal; but according to The New Times, that has not prevented the authorities from charging those arrested with serious crimes including treason and sentencing them to length terms behind bars (newtimes.ru/articles/detail/246064).

            Earlier reports suggest that such attacks have been happening at increasing frequency even though the Russian government in general has thrown a veil of secrecy over them as far as the media is concerned (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/07/anti-war-underground-responsible-for-23.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/11/since-february-no-fewer-than-70-russian.html).

Two-Thirds of Former Russian Convicts Pardoned for Fighting in Ukraine Earlier had been Found Guilty of Murder, ‘Dokha’ Study Finds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 23 – By allowing first the Wagner PMC and then the regular Russian army to recruit in Russian prisons with promises of pardons for those who agreed to fight in Ukraine, the Kremlin has filled the ranks of its forces there not just with criminals but with those guilty of the most serious crimes, including murder.

            According to a new study carried out by Russia’s Dokha research group that examined a sample of 50 Russian prisoners who were pardoned after service in Ukraine, 68 percent – that is two out of every three men in this category – had been convicted of murder (doxa.team/articles/amnistiya).

In addition, other former convicts who have been pardoned for service in Ukraine were judged guilty of rape, participation in an organized criminal group, extortion, drug dealing, and theft. And in more than a few cases, those getting pardoned now were earlier found to be guilty of more than one of these crimes.

            It is perhaps no surprise that those convicted of such crimes and facing the longest jail sentences would be the most interested in getting pardons and thus in agreeing to fight in Ukraine, but this figure will only convince many that the Russian army is filling up with criminals and believe that such men will affect the attitudes and actions of their fellow soldiers.

            In addition, other former convicts who have been pardoned for service in Ukraine were judged guilty of rape, participation in an organized criminal group, extortion, drug dealing, and theft. And in more than a few cases, those getting pardoned now were earlier found to be guilty of more than one of these crimes.

Kremlin Policies Accelerating Trends in Russia toward Fewer Marriages, More Divorces, More Abortions and Fewer Children, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 23 – Vladimir Putin may have declared 2024 the year of the family, but his policies are exacerbating current trends toward fewer marriages, more divorces, more abortions and fewer children, a pattern that will inevitably mean Russia’s further demographic decline, according to Russian experts.

            At a meeting devoted to the state of the Russian family, these specialists suggested that Russian society was moving toward one that would be characterized by few marriages and even fewer children, a situation they said was already “a catastrophe” and will only become worse (nakanune.ru/articles/121739/).

            According to one speaker, families with children now constitute only a few more than one in five households in Russia. Of these approximately 23 million families, 15 million have only one child, six to seven million to and fewer than two million have three or more children, the number of offspring needed to increase the population.

            Other speakers pointed to rising tides of divorces – 70 percent of marriages end in divorce – and of abortions. Russian officials claim that today abortions end pregnancies in only 25 percent of the cases but in fact, sociological studies show that the actual number of abortions is one in every two pregnancies or 50 percent.

            Unfortunately, instead of fighting these trends by addressing the family as an issue, these specialists continued, the Russian government has focused instead on individuals rather than families in its limited aid packages, undermining families because aid goes to them rather than to families, thus doing nothing to keep families together and ensuring more children are born.

            That must change, the specialists said. Otherwise, the fertility rate and Russia’s overall population will continue to fall and at accelerating rates. And while some of these trends are underlying social shifts, the government will bear enormous responsibility for precisely the outcome it says it does not want.  

Moscow Now Facing ‘Triple Epidemic’ of Respiratory Diseases with Fewer Resources to Fight it Because of Money Being Spent on War in Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 23 – Russia now faces “a tridemic,” the combination of rapidly rising rates of glue, upper respiratory infections, and COVID, without even the medical resources it had against the latter three and four years ago because of Putin’s healthcare optimization and his use of funds from medical services to fight his war in Ukraine.

            And because of this conjunction of developments, that country is seeing an explosive growth in these infections, as the result both of immigration from places where the rates were already high and the increasing costs and shortages of medicines to fight these infections, Academician Gennady Onishchenko says (nakanune.ru/articles/121747/).        

            As a result, in 48 of the federal subjects, epidemic conditions exist, with the number of infections there continuing to rise and the disease spreading and increasing in others, he says. Statistics are often hard to come by, but one measure of how bad things are becoming concerns the spread of whooping cough, an illness often linked to these upper respiratory infections.

            Onischhenko says that their number in Russia has risen from 1100 in 2021, the first year of the covid pandemic, to 27,800 in 2023 and continues to go up. (For a detailed discussion of Putin's shift of government spending from health needs to the war, see istories.media/news/2024/01/24/rossiya-sokratila-raskhodi-na-zakupku-lekarstv-v-2023-godu-sekonomlennie-sredstva-mogli-pereraspredelit-na-nuzhdi-armii/.)