In the Spring issue of World Affairs Journal, there are two articles that caught my attention. The first describes the Demographic collapse of Russia:
Drunken Nation: Russia’s Depopulation Bomb
A specter is haunting Russia today. It is not the specter of Communism—that ghost has been chained in the attic of the past—but rather of depopulation—a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation. The mass deaths associated with the Communist era may be history, but another sort of mass death may have only just begun, as Russians practice what amounts to an ethnic self-cleansing.
Since 1992, Russia’s human numbers have been progressively dwindling. This slow motion process now taking place in the country carries with it grim and potentially disastrous implications that threaten to recast the contours of life and society in Russia, to diminish the prospects for Russian economic development, and to affect Russia’s potential influence on the world stage in the years ahead.
Much of the modern world is slowly depopulating as our material wealth, our 20th century history of mass slaughter, and our over-valued narcissism lead to an existential crisis reflected in our declining fertility rates.
[There are clearly many, many more elements involved in this decline; the sum total is an existential crisis for much of the West. I include Russia as part of the West for reasons which will beocme clearer in a following post and because though the Russians have always had a bit of a dissociative relationship with the West, it is just that Westernized part of Russia which is failing the fastest.]
The author documents that Russia's falling population results from dramatic increases in death rates. Russians have a plummeting life expectancy.
[With a drop in life expectancy, raising children becomes secondarily a less propitious eventuality; children cost resources that the existentially impaired Russians feel would be better spent elsewhere. Although I do not have the numbers in front of me, some obscene percentage of Russian pregnancies end in abortions.]
A fair amount of the decline in life expectancy is directly or indirectly tied to alcoholism and alcohol abuse:
Taken together, then, deaths from cardiovascular disease and from injuries and poisoning have evidently been the main drivers of modern Russia’s strange upsurge in premature mortality and its broad, prolonged retrogression in public health conditions. One final factor that is intimately associated with both of these causes of mortality is alcohol abuse. [Emphasis mine-SW]
Unlike drinking patterns prevalent in, say, Mediterranean regions—where wine is regarded as an elixir for enhancing conversation over meals and other social gatherings, and where public drunkenness carries an embarrassing stigma—mind-numbing, stupefying binge drinking of hard spirits is an accepted norm in Russia and greatly increases the danger of fatal injury through falls, traffic accidents, violent confrontations, homicide, suicide, and so on. Further, extreme binge drinking (especially of hard spirits) is associated with stress on the cardiovascular system and heightened risk of CVD mortality.
How many Russians are actually drinkers, and how heavily do they actually drink? Officially, Russia classifies some 7 million out of roughly 120 million persons over 15 years of age, or roughly 6 percent of its adult population, as heavy drinkers. But the numbers are surely higher than this. According to data compiled by the World Health Organization, as of 2003 Russia was Europe’s heaviest per capita spirits consumer; its reported hard liquor consumption was over four times as high as Portugal’s, three times that of Germany or Spain, and over two and a half times higher than that of France.
Yet even these numbers may substantially understate hard spirit use in Russia, since the WHO figures follow only the retail sale of hard liquor. But samogon—home-brew, or “moonshine”—is, according to some Russian researchers, a huge component of the country’s overall intake. Professor Alexander Nemstov, perhaps Russia’s leading specialist in this area, argues that Russia’s adult population—women as well as men—puts down the equivalent of a bottle of vodka per week.
From the epidemiological standpoint, local-level studies have offered fairly chilling proof that alcohol is a direct factor in premature mortality. One forensic investigation of blood alcohol content by a medical examiner’s office in a city in the Urals, for example, indicated that over 40 percent of the younger male decedents evaluated had probably been alcohol-impaired or severely intoxicated at the time of death—including one quarter of the deaths from heart disease and over half of those from accidents or injuries. But medical and epidemiological studies have also demonstrated that, in addition to its many deaths from consumption of ordinary alcohol, Russia also suffers a grisly toll from alcohol poisoning, as the country’s drinkers, in their desperate quest for intoxication, down not only sometimes severely impure samogon, but also perfumes, alcohol-based medicines, cleaning solutions, and other deadly liquids. Death rates from such alcohol poisoning appear to be at least one hundred times higher in Russia than the United States—this despite the fact that the retail price in Russia today is lower for a liter of vodka than a liter of milk.
Alcohol abuse is a complicated subject. People tend to drink more when it is socially sanctioned, one reason that college students tend to binge drink. Drunken frat boys, football fans, etc are celebrated in TV commercials and movies as relatively normative on college campuses, so the fact that college aged young people, most arriving with very little experience of responsible drinking, binge drink is troubling but not surprising. Beyond that, alcohol abuse increases with stress. People who are stressed find relief from anxiety and depression in alcohol, which eventually worsens their realistic situation but provides short term relief. There are also genetic predispositions to alcohol dependency and the easy availability of alcohol plays a role, as well.
My suspicion is that a significant underlying factor in the collapse of population in Russia relates to what can only be understood as a collapse of meaning. Further, this collapse of meaning is perhaps worst in the West but is a part of Modernity that is beginning to be felt in some surprising locales. I will return to this and expand upon it when I address the second World Affairs Journal article that caught my attention. Life On Venus: Europe’s Last Man is a very different sort of article which does not look at Europe's demographics but explores Europe's zeitgeist through the eyes of three novelists. It provides a great deal of food for thought.
Recent Comments