A FLEEING POPULATION
Russians have been fleeing their homeland for decades. During the decades of the Cold War, Soviet rule was punctuated by repeated waves of politically and religiously motivated flight. Even so, the pace at which people are leaving Russia today is notable—and deeply concerning. Between 100,000 and 150,000 Russians now emigrate every year, compounding Russia’s population crisis. 39
Russians are fleeing for both economic and political reasons. A 2011 poll by the Moscow-based Levada Center identified economic pressures—such as the high cost of living—as principal factors in Russians’ decision to depart. 40But much of the blame rests with the Russian government as well. Over the past decade, the autocratic state established by Vladimir Putin and his followers has made a tiny minority of Russians wildly rich, while the vast majority of Russians are left to grapple with an environment that is deeply toxic to entrepreneurship, innovation, and honest business. This includes high-profile instances of Kremlin retribution against those who seek to change the status quo. One such victim was lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was imprisoned in 2009 for his investigation into official government corruption, and who subsequently died behind bars after being denied medical treatment for gallstones and pancreatitis.
The result is an exodus of Russians that rivals in size and scope the mass out-migration that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. “The most independent and qualified people are leaving and for the same fundamental reasons,” political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin noted in the newspaper Novaya Gazetain January 2011. “The model of the state built by Lenin and Stalin and softly being restored by Putin is flawed from the outset.” 41
More than two million people are believed to have left Russia during the thirteen years that President Vladimir Putin has been in power. 42Many of those who stay are thinking of leaving. A 2012 poll by the RIA Novosti news agency found that one in five Russians desires to live abroad. 43The problem is particularly acute among Russia’s youth: according to one estimate, nearly 40 percent of Russians between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five are contemplating departure. 44
This mass exodus is having a devastating effect on the Russian economy. By 2030, it is estimated that the country will lose as many as seventeen million skilled workers—close to a quarter of its total workforce of 75.4 million. 45Farther into the future, Russia’s working population is projected to be smaller still, with catastrophic effects on the country’s productivity and economic dynamism. (So profound has this trend become that the International Monetary Fund recently suggested that the Russian government raise the retirement age to sixty-three by 2030 in order to preserve its labor force.) 46
REMEDYING THE PROBLEM?
Russians are not ignorant of their demographic dilemma, and neither is the Kremlin. Putin has described Russia’s demographic decline as “the most acute problem of contemporary Russia.” 47But his government has not implemented a plausible strategy for remedying the situation. Rather, preoccupied with regaining its place as a global power, it has only peripherally begun to address the drivers of national decline.
In 2008, for example, Russia established a Day of Married Love and Family Happiness—portrayed as an alternative to Valentine’s Day—in an effort to reinforce the importance of the family unit. 48In 2010, the Russian government launched the “mother’s capital” program, which provides a government credit of about $11,000 to mothers who have a second or third child. 49This was followed by the announcement in April 2011 that the Russian government would invest some 1.5 trillion rubles ($50 billion) into “demography projects.” 50The same month, the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, introduced legislation to discourage abortion by disqualifying it from coverage under the national medical service. That summer, then president Dmitry Medvedev signed the first law since the end of communism to restrict abortion. 51
More recently, Putin pledged that families with more than three children will receive monthly subsidies of $250 per child. 52The Kremlin has become so desperate to encourage procreation that in early 2013 it tried to turn 1990s R&B crooners Boyz II Men into demographic Viagra. The group was invited to Moscow to play a Valentine’s Day concert in hopes that their music would make concertgoers amorous, leading to lovemaking. 53
What Russia has notdone is make serious investments in vital infrastructure—the social services and education that cumulatively serve as the lifeblood of a vibrant society. Unlike the United States, which used the 1990s to rebuild and reorient its economy toward domestic prosperity, Russia experienced no analogous “peace dividend” following the collapse of the USSR. Rather, Russia limped through its first post-Soviet decade buffeted by economic instability, culminating in a catastrophic economic meltdown in 1998.
In the last dozen years, Russia’s economy has stabilized, largely due to the high price of world energy and Russia’s emergence as a bona fide oil and natural gas powerhouse. But Russia’s energy boom has not translated into meaningful improvements to the country’s social safety net. According to a 2011 study by the European Union, Russia’s healthcare expenditures have stagnated as a percentage of GDP since 1995. 54Nor are there many plans for upgrades on the horizon. In September 2012, Deputy Economic Development Minister Andrey Klepach announced that no reform in the education, public health, and science sectors was possible in the near term because of the government’s budget priorities. 55
What are those priorities, exactly? Over the past decade, Russia’s national treasure has been expended overwhelmingly on projects that reaffirm its image and perception of itself as a great power. These include the country’s strategic arsenal, which is now undergoing a major modernization aimed in part at countering and defeating U.S. missile defenses. 56But the quiet human catastrophe now reshaping Russia at home has been left largely unaddressed.
A CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE
What makes Russia’s demographic decline so devastating is that it reflects the outlook many Russians have of themselves. The trends—high mortality, rampant alcoholism and drug use, widespread abortion and divorce, and emigration—are the symptoms of a population that has lost hope in its future, and of a citizenry that has given up on their government as a steward of their needs and protector of their rights and freedoms.
The results have been predictable. Russians with the means to leave have already done so or are actively contemplating an exit. (In an accurate microcosm of the prevailing mood among Russians, a popular blog on current social ills is entitled Pora Valit: time to scram.) 57Those who are unable to leave have embraced alcohol, drugs, and other means of coping to get by. And still others have gone to even greater extremes: in the two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union, an estimated eight hundred thousand Russians have committed suicide. 58That is one suicide every fifteen minutes.
In a nation that is coming apart, many of Russia’s citizens appear to be united by one thing: the stark realization that, for all of the Kremlin’s talk of renewed national greatness, the Russian state is a dying project.
CHAPTER THREE
MUSLIM RUSSIA RISING