Russia's ethnic self-cleansing

Demographer Nicholas Eberstadt reports that Russia is literally drinking itself into oblivion. Aside from the collapsing birth rate Excerpt:

No literate and urban society in the modern world faces a risk of deaths from injuries comparable to the one that Russia experiences.

Russia's patterns of death from injury and violence (by whatever provenance) are so extreme and brutal that they invite comparison only with the most tormented spots on the face of the planet today. The five places estimated to be roughly in the same league as Russia as of 2002 were Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. To go by its level of mortality injury alone, Russia looks not like an emerging middle-income market economy at peace, but rather like an impoverished sub-Saharan conflict or post-conflict society.

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.

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.

Eberstadt points out that while European nations are suffering similar collapses in population, and a rise in illegitimate births, they live in prosperity, with strong guarantees of material care for their populations. Not so in Russia. Putin's ambitions for Russia's resurrection don't factor in the disastrous fact that there won't be enough people around to accomplish what he hopes for.