Dear Colleague:

Condorcet's phrase, "demography is destiny," is much overused.  But a
country without children, even a country as old and vast as Mother Russia,
cannot stand.

Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
21 December 2006
Vol. 8, No. 50


Motherless Russia
By Joseph A. D'Agostino

"In general, Russia suffers from a frightening poverty in the sphere of
facts and a frightening wealth of all types of arguments," wrote Chekhov
in a letter to a friend.  Now, Russia suffers from a destructive poverty
of a sort that she has not in a long time, of people, while she continues
to groan under an increasing surfeit of social and domestic problems.
Previous would-be conquerors of Russia such as Napoleon and Hitler failed
due to her harsh winters and inexhaustible supply of men.  Contemporary
conquerors, and there are two eyeing Russia hungrily, apparently will have
only the winters with which to contend.

Some think that France will be the first European country in modern times
to be taken over by Muslims due to her very large, violent immigrant
population and effeminate native populace.  Others point to the
Netherlands, from which native Dutch people are beginning to flee in the
face of hostile Islamism among the immigrants in that densely-populated
nation.  But Russia--a huge nation with vast natural resources, thousands
of nuclear warheads, and until recently a global superpower--may be the
first to go under.  This seems possible even though Russia suffers little
from the suicidal tolerance and multiculturalism that afflicts Western
Europeans.

All the would-be conquerors, tyrannical tsars, and sinister Communists
could not destroy Russia.  Yet there is a force more powerful than all
these, a force which can overcome comparatively minor factors such as
wealth, size, and military power, and that is demographics.  And it is
demographics that will deliver Russia into the hands of chaos, Islam,
China, or most likely a combination of all three.

Among large countries of the world, Russia is disintegrating the fastest.
Her total fertility rate is down to 1.3 children per woman in her lifetime
according to the United Nations Population Division, far below the
replacement rate of 2.1.  This is lowest low fertility from which no human
society has ever recovered.  An astounding 70% of Russian pregnancies end
in abortion, taking stereotypical Russian fatalism to new depths.  Russian
men have a life expectancy on par with Bangladeshis.  Young people are
emigrating out of Russia fast.  In fact, her population is plummeting by
700,000 people a year and is already 5 million below its peak of 15 years
ago.  Given the sky-high abortion rate, very low birthrate, and rapid
emigration of young people, Russia is aging fast.  In 20 years, one out of
four Russians will be 60 or over.  Men in particular are dropping like
flies: There are only 86.6 men for every 100 women in Russia (in the
United States, it's 96.8).

In the last years of Soviet Communism, Russia's birthrate was 2.1.  As odd
as it may sound, Russian society was healthier then.  What do greater
freedoms matter if there are no people to enjoy them?  Of course, how free
Russia is today, with her fascist president and KGB-dominated
gangster-style capitalism, is debatable.

No one can argue that Russia is overcrowded.  She has a mere eight people
per square kilometer.  In the future, who will defend all this empty space
and the resources and weapons it contains?

In 2015, less than ten years from now, Muslims could make up a majority of
the Russian military.  Military service is compulsory for young Russian
men, though only 10% actually serve due to college deferments, bribes to
escape duty, and the like.  Given the famously brutal Russian military,
perhaps avoiding military service is forgivable.  But will the generals be
able to avoid having a Muslim military if most young men who haven't fled
Russia are Muslim?  Will such a military operate effectively given the
fury that many domestic Muslims feel toward the Russian military's tactics
in the Muslim region of Chechnya?  What if other Muslim regions of
Russia--some of which contain huge oil reserves--rebel against Moscow?
Will Muslim soldiers fight and kill to keep them part of the Russian
motherland?

Last year, Russia's top Muslim religious leader Ravil Gaynutdin, chairman
of the Council of Muftis of Russia, asserted that 23 million indigenous
Muslims live in Russia, which has a total population of 143 million.
Russia also has about 4 million Muslim immigrants, making her total Muslim
population around 27 million or almost 20%.  Even if Gaynutdin is
exaggerating the numbers, no one disputes that it's the Muslims who are
having the children--and that Russians of Christian heritage are having
very few indeed.  And Muslim men live a lot longer, on average, than
Russian men as a whole, perhaps due to intact family structures and
relative lack of alcoholism.

Middle Eastern money has been pouring into Russia to fortify Islam and
serve the increasingly radical Muslim population there, just as it has
almost everywhere else in the world.  In 1990, there were 500 mosques in
Russia.  Now, there are 5,000.

With birthrates, death rates, and emigration rates the way they are now,
it is highly plausible that Russia could be majority Muslim by 2040.  All
that oil, all that land, all those nukes for Islam.

Maybe not.  There is some competition.  The Chinese have been colonizing
eastern Russia, where so many of that great nation's resources lie but so
few of her people live, since the Soviet Union's collapse.  Up to five
million Chinese live in far eastern Russia, inhabited by as few as 15
million Russians.  The number of Chinese grows every day while the number
of Russians decreases.  If Russia is going to break up, why shouldn't the
Communist Chinese get some of the best bits?  That area used to belong to
China anyway.  China's fast-growing economy needs ever more raw material,
and she has become a net importer of oil, an expensive commodity whose
supply is always threatened by instability.  As PRI President Steve Mosher
points out in his book Hegemon, taking control of Siberia from a declining
Russia could go a long way toward realizing China's superpower dreams.

Just as Russia participated in the partitioning of Poland, look to the
Muslims and Chinese to partition Russia, or at least large, resource-rich
parts of her.  And all because of demographics.


Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.

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