Mother Russia is FUCKED!!!

[GHook93]

People will say it's wishful thinking because I hate the land of my ancestors, but it's the truth. Like all communist dytopia's reproduction rates ALWAYS drop as the quality of life and the amount the government takes from you drops. Every year Russia drops in population. The piece I quote below was from 2006 when the population was 142 mil now it's in the 130 mil.

What are the issues:
Russia Is Toast - Business Insider
(1) Abortion rate OUT-PACES birth rate
(2) Death rate FAR FAR out-paces birth rate
(3) One third of Russia villages have been deserted. Not good, since these used to be hubs of population growth
(4) Depopulation is killing GDP
(5) The business environment sucks. Russian tycoons are fleeing in droves. Who will the government steal from then? The "other" people, which will provide more incentive to NOT reproduce!
(6) The Opposition, who desire a better Russia, go to jail or are killed. Politic repression aka Soviet Style creates a bad environment to raise a large family!
(7) 50% of exports are energy based! Good when prices are HIGH, bad when prices are low. Sustainable for the future success. Not a chance!

Read more: Russia Is Toast - Business Insider

Once-mighty Russia fades to a dying population - The Boston Globe

Russia is the only major industrial nation that is losing population. Its people are succumbing to one of the world's fastest-growing AIDS epidemics, resurgent tuberculosis, rampant cardiovascular disease, alcohol and drug abuse, smoking, suicide, and the lethal effects of unchecked industrial pollution.

In addition, abortions outpaced births last year by more than 100,000. An estimated 10 million Russians of reproductive age are sterile because of botched abortions or poor health. The public healthcare system is collapsing. And many parents in more prosperous urban areas say they can't afford homes large enough for the number of children they would like to have.

The former Soviet Union, with about 300 million people, was the world's third-most populous country, behind China and India. Slightly more than half of its citizens lived in Russia. The country has lost the equivalent of a city of 700,000 people every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, only partially offset by an influx of people from other former Soviet republics. A country that sprawls across one-eighth of the globe is now home to 142 million people.

The losses have been disproportionately male. At the height of the power of the Soviet Union, its people lived almost as long as Americans. But now, the average Russian man can expect to live about 59 years, 16 years less than an American man and 14 less than a Russian woman.

Sergei Mironov, chairman of the upper house of Russia's parliament, said last year that if the trend didn't change, the population would fall to 52 million by 2080. ``There will no longer be a great Russia," he said. ``It will be torn apart piece by piece, and finally cease to exist."

That may be an overstatement, but there are serious questions about whether Russia will be able to hold on to its far eastern lands along the border with China over the next century or field an army, let alone a workforce to support the ill and the elderly.

Russian officials, flush with revenue from record prices for the country's oil exports, have started to respond. President Vladimir V. Putin pledged payments this year of $111 a month to mothers who choose to have a second child, plus a nest egg of $9,260 to be used for education, a mortgage, or pensions. He also called for renewed efforts to attract ethnic Russians living in the ex-Soviet republics.

``Russia has a huge territory, the largest territory in the world," Putin said. ``If the situation remains unchanged, there will simply be no one to protect it."

The economic earthquake of Russia's transition from communism to capitalism plunged tens of millions into poverty overnight and changed the value systems upon which many had planned their lives.

A small minority, mostly in urban centers such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, were able to exploit the absence of rules in the chaotic 1990s to become fabulously wealthy. But such a profound social transition, coming at the end of a century of war, revolution, and ruthless social experimentation, condemned a great many more to a deep malaise.

Those who lost out have proved susceptible to drinking, smoking, and other habits that killed millions of Russians even in the best of times. In more extreme cases, they kill themselves.

Russia's suicide rate, at about 36 per 100,000 people, is second only to that of Lithuania, according to the Serbsky National Research Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry. In some remote areas of Russia, the rate exceeds 100 per 100,000.

Some say the cause of Russia's problems can be found in communism's willful destruction of generations of the country's most capable and adaptable people.

``Seventy-five years of Bolshevik life in this country led to the formation of a tribe of people which was cultivated to listen to orders, and fulfill them," said Alexander Gorelik, a St. Petersburg physician. Stalinism, he said, aimed for ``the planned and gradual physical destruction of the most moral, the most creative group of the population."

``There is such a thing as a will for life," he said. ``And the whole trouble is that the Russian public in general, and especially the male population, has a big deficiency in this area."

Russia has a long history of alcohol abuse. Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev tried to tackle the problem 20 years ago by limiting the production and distribution of liquor. When he did, male life expectancy increased three years.

But massive drinking resumed when the controls were eased. The average Russian drinks 5 gallons of pure alcohol a year, causing an estimated 900,000 deaths over the past decade through acute alcohol poisoning, fights, and accidents, according to figures released by Tatyana Yakovleva, head of the Russian parliament's healthcare committee, at a recent conference in Moscow. Others have permanent brain damage or liver damage from homemade alcohol.

It has been five years since Svetlana Glukhova was diagnosed as HIV-positive, but she says she still has no idea whether she needs drug therapy. Doctors at the only AIDS center in her city do not have the necessary laboratory equipment to decide that.

She does know that even when she took her first AIDS test, the sores on the fingers she once used to inject heroin already were failing to heal.

The United Nations says Russia has the worst AIDS problem in Europe, fueled by ``extraordinarily large numbers of young people who inject drugs." But the disease has spread widely through the population, and more than half of all new cases result from heterosexual intercourse. Officially, 340,000 Russians are infected with HIV or AIDS, but the UN says the number could easily be four to 10 times higher.

Compounding the problem, most Russian victims are young. The prevalence of the illness among young people threatens to add to Russia's demographic meltdown by killing them before they can bring a new generation into the world

 

[GHook93]

Total Population by Country, 1950, 2000, 2015, 2025, 2050 (Medium-Fertility Variant)

2000 - 145 mil
2012 - Under 140M
2015 - 133M
2025 - 125M
2050 - 100M

The 2050 drop isn't absolute because things could turn that around, but the 2015 and 2025 are near certain, since what has happened the last 20 years going to take time to reverse, even if that reversal took place today.

It's doesn't appear to get any better. There ecomony is built on energy commodities that goes through to many booms and busts to create stability that encourages reproduction. The government is taking steps backwards toward Soviet style rule. The mafia is so repressive it creates disincentive. Abortion and AIDS high. Bad winters, poor healthcare. Very inhospitible to immigrants (both in the native reaction to them and the lack of economic incentive for them to come)!

Expect it to continue!