Толстый и тонкий

[Lord Protector]

How to Solve the Putin Problem

 

(...)

 

That’s why the objective of our sanctions strategy should be to get the Russians who’ve been keeping Putin in power, or tolerating Putin in power, to throw that knockout punch.

The key to forcing these Russians to act, and thus to making the sanctions strategy succeed, will be to rapidly widen the gap that already exists between their financial interests and Putin’s political ambitions.

 

(...)

 

All they care about are their yachts, their private jets, and the blonde-bombshell-shopoholic mistresses they stash at their multi-million-dollar condos in London, New York, and on the Riviera, and like to flash around at swishy restaurants.

Are they really willing to give up all this for -- Donetsk?  Or for Riga, or Tallinn?  Are you kidding?

That’s why the sanctions will work if the president and his European counterparts will keep tightening the screws; if they keep making commerce more difficult for Russia’s serious business executives, for instance by blocking their access to capital, and if they keep making life more miserable for Russia’s playboy oligarchs, for instance by canceling their credit cards and denying landing rights to their private jets.  And if the president and European leaders keep telling these Russians -- bluntly and publicly -- that all this will end the moment Vladimir Putin leaves the Kremlin for good.

 

(...)

 

Simply put, we should make clear to the Russian business executives and oligarchs who are the target of Western sanctions that Putin is their problem, not ours.  These people may lack the spark of political genius or the high-minded patriotism that drove our country’s Founding Fathers -- but they aren’t stupid. 

It won’t be long before a bunch of them get together for a quiet conversation -- perhaps in a Moscow board room, more likely on a yacht anchored off the Cote d’Azur -- to, um, decide what might be best for Russia’s future.

 

Since subtlety doesn’t work with Russians, the president and his European counterparts should also make absolutely clear that we have no interest whatever in how these people solve their Putin problem. 

If they can talk good old Vladimir into leaving the Kremlin with full military honors and a 21-gun salute -- that would be fine with us. 

If Putin is too too stubborn to acknowledge that his career is over, and the only way to get him out of the Kremlin is feet-first, with a bullet hole in the back of his head -- that would also be okay with us.

 

Nor would we object to a bit of poetic justice.... For instance, if the next time Putin’s flying back to Moscow from yet another visit with his good friends in Cuba, or Venezuela, or Iran, his airplane gets blasted out of the sky by some murky para-military group that somehow, inexplicably, got its hands on a surface-to-air missile.

 

Herbert E. Meyer 

 

http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/08/how_to_solve_the_putin_problem.html

 

 

Herbert E. Meyer is a leading authority on the strategic use of intelligence. He is founder and President of Real-World Intelligence Inc., the world's leading designer of Intelligence Systems for business worldwide. During the Reagan Administration Mr. Meyer served as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. In these positions he managed production of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimates and other top-secret projections for the President and his national security advisers. Mr. Meyer is widely credited with being the first senior U.S. government official to forecast the Soviet Union's collapse. He later was awarded the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, which is the Intelligence Community's highest honor.

As an acknowledged authority on the process and techniques of writing, Mr. Meyer's career includes his being a journalist, an author, and a business entrepreneur.

 

Ono što ovaj idiot ne shvata je da je politički trenutak u Rusiji porodio Putina a ne Putin politički trenutak. Oni imaju problem sa naraslom ekonomskom i vojnom snagom Rusije a ne sa Putinom. Trebalo bi da zaustave Rusiju a ne Putina. To će ići mnogo teže danas nego u vreme kada su švercovali stingere u Avganistan. Ako ne bude Putina doći će Rogozin. Ako ne bude Rogozina doći će neko drugi, za njih još neprihvatljiviji.

Drugo, vrlo dobro zna da batina ima dva kraja i da ako se otvori pandorina kutija nasilja onako kako predlaže da onda više niko nije bezbedan.  Ponajmanje on i njegovi pajtosi.

Edited August 31, 2014 by slow

[Filipenko]

Putin breaks ground on Russia-China gas pipeline, world's biggest

 

 

 

[Eraserhead]

 

Paranoja kao drzavna ideologija. Clanak je iz juna:

 

 

 

On the face of it, the story sounds familiar. Vladimir Putin’s nostalgia for the greatness of the Soviet Union, his crackdowns on opponents, his defiant insistence that Russia can make her own way in the world. All these have been constants of his 14-year rule. But the past few weeks since Crimea was annexed by Russia have seen Putin embark on something of a different order than has gone before. For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin is overtly campaigning to cut Russia off from the world. More, Putin is building a state ideology based on the rejection of Western systems and values and the demonisation of internal enemies and traitors.

 

Moscow’s descent into self-isolation has been precipitous. Over the past three months alone, the Kremlin and its loyal legislators in the State Duma have brought the numbers of Russian State employees banned from leaving the country for security reasons to nearly five million; they have introduced criminal penalties for criticising the State-approved version of history; they have introduced compulsory registration for citizens with dual nationality and forcibly labelled all non-governmental organisations with foreign funding “foreign agents”; they have made bloggers subject to draconian “anti-extremism” laws – which include promoting anti-government protest. Senior officials have discussed restricting access to Facebook, Skype, YouTube and Twitter, and mooted setting up a Russian-only internet. The last surviving handful of independent websites and an internet-based TV station have been summarily shuttered – and when one site, grani.ru, challenged the ban, a Moscow court ruled that the authorities “did not have to explain to the websites why they were blocked”.  Bloggers with more than 3000 followers have to register on a Federal Security Service database.

 

At the same time, Putin has ordered his Central Bank to set up a Russian-based credit card processing system to rival Visa and MasterCard, and government-employed programmers to create a State-run internet search engine called Sputnik. The government has banned the US-based Global Positioning System from setting up stations in Russia and has boosted a Russian-made rival, Glonass.

 

In a nutshell, Putin’s philosophy is based on the idea that “Russianness is being assailed from without,” says Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University – but Putin’s message is that “we can cut ourselves off from global currents... We get to define who we are.”

 

Putin’s conservative and nationalist ideology has been several years in the making – but has come into sharp relief since Crimea. “Russia is not Europe,” the Culture Ministry officially announced last month. Putin has also vociferously denounced Western concepts of tolerance and multiculturalism, describing the West’s “so-called tolerance” as “infertile and sexless.”

 

Conchita Wurst’s victory at the Eurovision Song Contest gave Russia’s homophobic legislators a field day, with Vitaly Milonov, author of recent Russian laws outlawing pro-gay “propaganda” demanding that Russia boycott the “Sodomites’ show”. But a key part of the Kremlin’s many-pronged campaign to control the lives and ideas of Russian citizens is to “create an ‘other’ – gays, immigrants, multiculturalism, the West, fascism,” says Sean Guillory of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies. “And by exclusion and demonisation of the ‘other’ you consolidate society against threats...  It defines who is a friend and who is an enemy, who we are, and who are the others.”

 

 

The Kremlin’s campaign to ban and discourage Russians from travelling abroad showcases the paranoid mood. In April the Russian Foreign Ministry “strongly recommended” that all Russian citizens “refrain from travelling abroad, particularly to countries that have extradition treaties with the US,” lest they fall victim to a supposed US “hunt” for Russian citizens in response to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. The ministry warned that “US-style justice is biased against Russian citizens” – citing arms dealer Viktor Bout and attempted drug smuggler Konstantin Yaroshenko as examples. Russian tourists could be “effectively kidnapped and transported to the US” to face trial “on the basis of, as a rule, dubious charges,”, according to the ministry. The list includes most countries in the world, including popular Russian vacation spots Turkey and Egypt – but leaves Russians free to travel in Andorra, the Vatican, a handful of Balkan and African nations, as well as Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, as well as China, Indonesia and North Korea. Recent legislation also imposed a blanket ban on all employees of the Interior Ministry from leaving Russia – ostensibly lest they reveal national secrets. Last month all employees of the Prosecutor’s Office were required to hand in their passports and seek special authorisation for holidays abroad, with travel permitted to only a handful of approved countries.

 

“It is far easier to cultivate an image of the country as a besieged fortress when military personnel, the police and intelligence agencies are unable to see the outside world with their own eyes,” says Vladimir Ryzhkov, a former opposition Duma member. Lawmakers are now discussing extending travel bans to draft-dodgers – which includes some 92% of eligible 18 year olds in any given year. And rules preventing debtors from leaving the country – which in the first quarter of this year affected 190,000 people with unpaid parking fines to alimony delinquents and worse – could be extended to the regime’s opponents who face draconian fines for participating in protests or speaking against the State, or the Church, online. Journalist Boris Stomakhin, for instance, faces up to eight years in prison for “inciting hatred of Orthodox believers by using an insulting term for the Almighty” and “justifying the actions of the terrorists who killed Tsar Alexander II” – which took place in 1881.

 

 

Andrei Lugovoi, the ultranationalist deputy responsible for drafting the rules on declaring dual citizenship, leaves no doubt that he considers Russians with second passports a “betrayal of national interests” and they should ultimately be outlawed. “Russia’s enemies are constantly looking for weak spots in our ranks,” Lugovoi wrote in his blog, blaming critics of the government for “seeking to disrupt normal life in Russia”, supported and guided by Western intelligence agencies. Lugovoi is himself a former KGB officer and is wanted in the UK for his alleged role in the murder of defector Alexander Litvinenko by polonium poisoning in London in 2006. The same paranoid spirit pervades rules branding all NGOs which receive funding from abroad as “foreign agents”. “These people are suspected of disloyalty by default,” says Svetlana Gannushkina of the group Memorial, which chronicles human rights abuses from Stalin’s gulag to racist police in today’s Moscow.

 

The sad truth is that most Russians won’t care very much about being cut off from the world – according to a 2012 study by Moscow’s Levada centre, fully 80% of Russians have never travelled outside the former Soviet Union and only 5% speak a foreign language at conversational level. But the most damaging result of the restrictions crackdown, says Ryzhkov, will be to quicken a brain drain of the smartest and most globalised Russians – exactly the kind of people Dmitry Medvedev tried to encourage to return to Russia during his short stand-in presidency between Putin’s second and third terms.

 

“As many as five million people have left Russia in the last 20 years, among them 20,000 PhD holders,” says Ryzhkov. “Judging from the current crackdown and the limits imposed on Russians’ remaining freedoms, the Kremlin is finding it increasingly difficult to hold on to those who remain.”

 

One of the latest wave of emigres is Pavel Durov, creator of the popular Russian social network Vkontakte. He left Russia last month after months of pressure from the authorities to hand over personal information on the organisers of a group in support of the Ukrainian protest movement on Vkontakte, and to ban the blog of anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny. “I am out of Russia and have no plans to go back,” Durov told Techcrunch.com. “I am afraid there is no going back, not after I publicly refused to cooperate with the authorities.”

 

Few Russians will be sorry to see him go. One of the sadly surprising things about the strident nationalism that accompanied the Ukraine crisis and Crimean annexation is how many of the emerging middle class have gone along with it. Three years ago, up to 100,000 largely educated and internet-literate citizens came out on the streets of Moscow to protest rigged Duma elections in the biggest challenge to the Kremlin since the end of the Soviet Union. Now, polls regularly show that swathes of Russia’s elite -support Putin’s new nationalism. A study by Russia’s Academy of Sciences showed that 79% of Russia’s middle class said the State “deserves support despite its many flaws”, 78% said that “stability was more important than change” and 49% said Russia needed a “firm hand” to keep order. Even more depressing for the tiny liberal opposition, the study found that of the 40% of the population judged “middle class” by the survey, only 13% were entrepreneurs and over half were employed by the government.

 

What’s clear is that Putin has given up on trying to please Russia’s tiny urban, technocratic, aspirational constituency and has turned full-on to appeal to Russia’s blue-collar voters. These are the very people who are most scared of the economic impact of globalisation and immigration – which is why Putin’s protectionist, conservative and technophobic message goes down so well (it also explains in part why he’s so admired by American Tea Party conservatives like Patrick Buchanan, whose electoral base is less-educated, white, working-class Americans).

 

The pre-Crimea Putin was pragmatic: his priority was stability and prosperity. If that meant squashing the odd protest and oligarch along the way, he did it. But post-Crimea, Putin has become a different kind of leader, motivated by ideology, regardless of the cost to Russia’s economic wellbeing. Never mind that Russia accounts for less than 2% of global GDP – Putin apparently believes that Russia doesn’t need Visa cards, international money markets, holidays abroad, membership of the G8 or the Council of Europe, and that his citizens should be sheltered from corrupt Western values and the corrosive influence of the internet. Putin is striking out on a uniquely Russian path – even if it leads to isolation, capital flight and the loss of his country’s brightest and best.

 

 

Edited September 1, 2014 by Eraserhead

[apostata]

Dan grada Novo-Sahalinska

 

 

 

A ja onu jednu konzervu što imam mjerkam već mjesec dana i sve mi žao otvoriti je.

[iDemo]

Ima se - može se... :)

[Turnbull]

Aj i ovde, ima dve ruske teme, ne zna čovek gde ste u kom trenutku.

 

The Dying Russians

Masha Gessen

Gueorgui Pinkhassov/Magnum Photos Aprelevka train station, Russia, 1997

Sometime in 1993, after several trips to Russia, I noticed something bizarre and disturbing: people kept dying. I was used to losing friends to AIDS in the United States, but this was different. People in Russia were dying suddenly and violently, and their own friends and colleagues did not find these deaths shocking. Upon arriving in Moscow I called a friend with whom I had become close over the course of a year. “Vadim is no more,” said his father, who picked up the phone. “He drowned.” I showed up for a meeting with a newspaper reporter to have the receptionist say, “But he is dead, don’t you know?” I didn’t. I’d seen the man a week earlier; he was thirty and apparently healthy. The receptionist seemed to think I was being dense. “A helicopter accident,” she finally said, in a tone that seemed to indicate I had no business being surprised.

The deaths kept piling up. People—men and women—were falling, or perhaps jumping, off trains and out of windows; asphyxiating in country houses with faulty wood stoves or in apartments with jammed front-door locks; getting hit by cars that sped through quiet courtyards or plowed down groups of people on a sidewalk; drowning as a result of diving drunk into a lake or ignoring sea-storm warnings or for no apparent reason; poisoning themselves with too much alcohol, counterfeit alcohol, alcohol substitutes, or drugs; and, finally, dropping dead at absurdly early ages from heart attacks and strokes.

Back in the United States after a trip to Russia, I cried on a friend’s shoulder. I was finding all this death not simply painful but impossible to process. “It’s not like there is a war on,” I said.

“But there is,” said my friend, a somewhat older and much wiser reporter than I. “This is what civil war actually looks like. “It’s not when everybody starts running around with guns. It’s when everybody starts dying.”

My friend’s framing stood me in good stead for years. I realized the magazine stories I was writing then were the stories of destruction, casualties, survival, restoration, and the longing for peace. But useful as that way of thinking might be for a journalist, it cannot be employed by social scientists, who are still struggling to answer the question, Why are Russians dying in numbers, and at ages, and of causes never seen in any other country that is not, by any standard definition, at war?

In the seventeen years between 1992 and 2009, the Russian population declined by almost seven million people, or nearly 5 percent—a rate of loss unheard of in Europe since World War II. Moreover, much of this appears to be caused by rising mortality. By the mid-1990s, the average St. Petersburg man lived for seven fewer years than he did at the end of the Communist period; in Moscow, the dip was even greater, with death coming nearly eight years sooner.

In 2006 and 2007, Michelle Parsons, an anthropologist who teaches at Emory University and had lived in Russia during the height of the population decline in the early 1990s, set out to explore what she calls “the cultural context of the Russian mortality crisis.” Her method was a series of long unstructured interviews with average Muscovites—what amounted to immersing herself in a months-long conversation about what made life, for so many, no longer worth living. The explanation that Parsons believes she has found is in the title of her new book, Dying Unneeded.

Parsons chose as her subjects people who were middle-aged in the early 1990s. Since she conducted her interviews in Moscow over a decade later, the study has an obvious structural handicap: her subjects are the survivors, not the victims, of the mortality crisis—they didn’t die—and their memories have been transformed by the intervening years of social and economic upheaval. Still, what emerges is a story that is surely representative of the experience of a fair number of Russians.

People of the generation Parsons describes were born in the desolate, hungry years following WWII. They grew up in communal apartments, with two or three generations of a single family occupying one or two rooms and sharing a hallway, bathroom, and kitchen with three or seven or even a dozen other families. But then, in the early 1960s, Nikita Khrushchev organized a construction boom: cheaply constructed apartment buildings went up all around the periphery of Moscow, and Russians—first and foremost, Muscovites—moved out of communal apartments en masse. By the Brezhnev years, in the late 1960s and 1970s, there were also Soviet-made cars and tiny country houses—such at least was the Soviet consumer dream, and it was within reach for a significant number of Russians.

In addition, three important things made life not only less harsh, relative to earlier years, but even worth living. One was the general perception of social and economic stability. Jobs were unquestionably secure and, starting in the 1960s, followed by a retirement guaranteed by the state. A second was the general sense of progress, both of the sort Soviet propaganda promised (the country was going to build the first communist society, in which money would be abolished and everyone would share in the plenty); and the personal material improvement this generation experienced itself moving toward. A third source of comfort of Soviet life was its apparent equality. A good number of people with connections enjoyed extraordinary perquisites compared to the vast majority of the population, but the wealth-and-privilege gap was concealed by the tall fences around the nomenklatura summer houses, the textbook and newspaper depictions of Soviet egalitarianism, and the glacial pace of mobility into one of the favored groups at the top.

Parsons and her subjects, whom she quotes at length, seem to have an acute understanding of the first two forces shaping Soviet society but are almost completely blind to the last: the hidden nature of Soviet social inequality. One woman says that the difference between current poverty and poverty in the postwar era is that “now there are rich folks.”

But by the early 1980s, the Soviet economy was stagnant and the Soviet political system moribund. Finally, a younger leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, emerged, but the decrepit structure proved incapable of change and, in short order, collapsed, taking with it the predictable life as hundreds of millions of people had known it. Russia rushed into a new capitalist future, which most of the population expected to bring prosperity and variety. Boris Yeltsin and his team of young, inexperienced reformers instituted economic shock therapy. As far as we know today, this series of radical measures jerked Russia back from the edge of famine but also plunged millions of people into poverty. Over the next decade, most Russian families—like their counterparts elsewhere in the former Soviet Union—actually experienced an improvement in their living conditions, but few who had spent many adult years in the old system regained the sense of solid ground under their feet.

“To Lyudmila, economic shock therapy looked a lot like war-ravaged Russia,” Parsons writes of one of her respondents. “In a terrible sense it was as if the poverty of her youth and the poverty of the early 1990s had merged together. Thirty-five years of her life, from age nineteen when she started work in the mechanics factory to age fifty-five when the Soviet Union fell, fell out of view.” Parsons devotes an entire chapter to comparisons between the collapse and chaos of the 1990s and the devastation that followed World War II. “Margarita told me with some disgust, ‘It is just like after the war.’ And then she would add—half angry, half baffled—’But there was no war.’ …The fifty-seven-year-old taxi driver I interviewed said, of those older than himself, ‘They will never understand what happened. No war, nothing. And everything fell apart.’”

Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos Workers in a tractor factory, Vladimir, Russia, 1972

Not only had the retirement system collapsed, but neither the job market nor their own families—those grown children who had once been entirely dependent on their parents—had any use for these people. Gone, too, was the radiant future: communist slogans were replaced with capitalist advertising that didn’t speak to the masses, who were in no position to over-consume. For those over forty, the message of the new era was that no one—not even the builders of an imaginary future—needed them anymore. Above all, the veil that had hidden the wealth of the few from the incredulous and envious gaze of the many had been ruthlessly removed: for the 1990s and much of the 2000s, Moscow would become the world capital of conspicuous consumption. No longer contributing to or enjoying the benefits of the system, members of the older generations, Parsons suggests, were particularly susceptible to early death.

Parsons’ argument is provocative but not entirely convincing. She describes Russia as though it were a new country that replaced the USSR, and it was this new country that suffered a mortality crisis, which can and should be explained entirely by social forces specific to itself. This is a standard way to approach the problem, and it is not a bad description of what many Russians actually experienced. But, by attempting to identify a single turning point, she overlooks more gradual changes that may have been underway well before 1991. For example, Parsons largely skips over the 1980s, with the broad social movements and the severe economic crises that marked the Gorbachev period.

In fact, if we zoom out from the early 1990s, where Parsons has located the Russian “mortality crisis,” we will see something astounding: it is not a crisis—unless, of course, a crisis can last decades. “While the end of the USSR marked one [of] the most momentous political changes of the twentieth century, that transition has been attended by a gruesome continuity in adverse health trends for the Russian population,” writes Nicholas Eberstadt in Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis: Dimensions, Causes, Implications, an exhaustive study published by the National Bureau of Asian Research in 2010. Eberstadt is an economist who has been writing about Soviet and Russian demographics for many years. In this book-length study, he has painted a picture as grim as it is mystifying—in part because he is reluctant to offer an explanation for which he lacks hard data.

Eberstadt is interested in the larger phenomenon of depopulation, including falling birth rates as well as rising death rates. He observes that this is not the first such trend in recent Russian history. There was the decline of 1917–1923—the years of the revolution and the Russian Civil War when, Eberstadt writes, “depopulation was attributable to the collapse of birth rates, the upsurge in death rates, and the exodus of émigrés that resulted from these upheavals.” There was 1933–1934, when the Soviet population fell by nearly two million as a result of murderous forced collectivization and a man-made famine that decimated rural Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, Russia. Then, from 1941 to 1946, the Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people in the war and suffered a two-thirds drop in birth rate. But the two-and-a-half decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union are the longest period of depopulation, and also the first to occur, on such a scale, in peacetime, anywhere in the world. “There is no obvious external application of state force to relieve, no obvious fateful and unnatural misfortune to weather, in the hopes of reversing this particular population decline,” writes Eberstadt. “Consequently, it is impossible to predict when (or even whether) Russia’s present, ongoing depopulation will finally come to an end.”

Russia has long had a low birth rate. The Soviet government fought to increase it by introducing a three-year maternity leave and other inducements, but for much of the postwar period it hovered below replacement rates. An exception was the Gorbachev era, when fertility reached 2.2. After 1989, however, it fell and still has not recovered: despite financial inducements introduced by the Putin government, the Russian fertility rate stands at 1.61, one of the lowest in the world (the US fertility rate estimate for 2014 is 2.01, which is also below replacement but still much higher than Russia’s).

And then there is the dying. In a rare moment of what may pass for levity Eberstadt allows himself the following chapter subtitle: “Pioneering New and Modern Pathways to Poor Health and Premature Death.” Russians did not start dying early and often after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “To the contrary,” writes Eberstadt, what is happening now is “merely the latest culmination of ominous trends that have been darkly evident on Russian soil for almost half a century.” With the exception of two brief periods—when Soviet Russia was ruled by Khrushchev and again when it was run by Gorbachev—death rates have been inexorably rising. This continued to be true even during the period of unprecedented economic growth between 1999 and 2008. In this study, published in 2010, Eberstadt accurately predicts that in the coming years the depopulation trend may be moderated but argues that it will not be reversed; in 2013 Russia’s birthrate was still lower and its death rate still higher than they had been in 1991. And 1991 had not been a good year.

Contrary to Parsons’s argument, moreover, Eberstadt shows that the current trend is not largely a problem of middle-aged Russians. While the graphs seem to indicate this, he notes, if one takes into account the fact that mortality rates normally rise with age, it is the younger generation that is staring down the most terrifying void. According to 2006 figures, he writes, “overall life expectancy at age fifteen in the Russian Federation appears in fact to be lower than for some of the countries the UN designates to be least developed (as opposed to less developed), among these, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Yemen.” Male life expectancy at age fifteen in Russia compares unfavorably to that in Ethiopia, Gambia, and Somalia.

Eberstadt sets out to find the culprit, and before conceding he can’t, he systematically goes down the list of the usual suspects. Infectious diseases, including not only HIV and TB but also normally curable STDs and every kind of hepatitis, have the run of the land in Russia, but do not in fact seem overrepresented in its death statistics; from a demographer’s point of view, as many Russians die of infections as would be expected in a country of its income level. Cardiovascular disease is an entirely different matter:

As of 1980, the Russian population may well have been suffering the very highest incidence of mortality from diseases of the circulatory system that had ever been visited on a national population in the entire course of human history—up to that point in time. Over the subsequent decades, unfortunately, the level of CVD mortality in the Russian Federation veered further upward…. By 2006… Russia’s mortality levels from CVD alone were some 30% higher than deaths in Western Europe from all causes combined.

And then there are the deaths from external causes—again going from bad to worse. “Deaths from injuries and poisoning had been much higher in Russia than in Western Europe in 1980—well over two and a half times higher, in fact.” As of 2006, he writes, it was more than five times as high.

So why do Russians have so many heart attacks, strokes, fatal injuries, and poisonings? One needs to have only a passing knowledge of Russian history and culture to tick off a list of culprits, and Eberstadt is thorough in examining each of them. True, Russians eat a fatty diet—but not as fatty as Western Europeans do. Plus, Russians, on average, consume fewer calories than Western Europeans, indicating that overeating is not the issue. Yes, Russia has taken abominable care of its environment, but it sees only a few more deaths from respiratory diseases than does Western Europe—and fewer deaths of diseases of the kidneys, which would be expected to result from pollution. Yes, Russians have lived through severe economic upheaval, but there is no indication that economic shock in a modern society leads quickly, or at all, to increased mortality—the Great Depression, for example, did not. Russia spends roughly as much on health care per capita as do the less-affluent European countries like Portugal. Russians smoke a lot—but not as much as Greeks and Spaniards, who live on average roughly as long as other Western Europeans.

The most obvious explanation for Russia’s high mortality—drinking—is also the most puzzling on closer examination. Russians drink heavily, but not as heavily as Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians—all countries that have seen an appreciable improvement in life expectancy since breaking off from the Soviet Bloc. Yes, vodka and its relatives make an appreciable contribution to the high rates of cardiovascular, violent, and accidental deaths—but not nearly enough to explain the demographic catastrophe. There are even studies that appear to show that Russian drinkers live longer than Russian non-drinkers. Parsons discusses these studies in some detail, and with good reason: it begins to suggest the true culprit. She theorizes that drinking is, for what its worth, an instrument of adapting to the harsh reality and sense of worthlessness that would otherwise make one want to curl up and die.

For Eberstadt, who is seeking an explanation for Russia’s half-century-long period of demographic regress rather than simply the mortality crisis of the 1990s, the issue of mental health also furnishes a kind of answer. While he suggests that more research is needed to prove the link, he finds that “a relationship does exist” between the mortality mystery and the psychological well-being of Russians:

Suffice it to say we would never expect to find premature mortality on the Russian scale in a society with Russia’s present income and educational profiles and typically Western readings on trust, happiness, radius of voluntary association, and other factors adduced to represent social capital.

Another major clue to the psychological nature of the Russian disease is the fact that the two brief breaks in the downward spiral coincided not with periods of greater prosperity but with periods, for lack of a more data-driven description, of greater hope. The Khrushchev era, with its post-Stalin political liberalization and intensive housing construction, inspired Russians to go on living. The Gorbachev period of glasnost and revival inspired them to have babies as well. The hope might have persisted after the Soviet Union collapsed—for a brief moment it seemed that this was when the truly glorious future would materialize—but the upheaval of the 1990s dashed it so quickly and so decisively that death and birth statistics appear to reflect nothing but despair during that decade.

If this is true—if Russians are dying for lack of hope, as they seem to be—then the question that is still looking for its researcher is, Why haven’t Russians experienced hope in the last quarter century? Or, more precisely in light of the grim continuity of Russian death, What happened to Russians over the course of the Soviet century that has rendered them incapable of hope? In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt argues that totalitarian rule is truly possible only in countries that are large enough to be able to afford depopulation. The Soviet Union proved itself to be just such a country on at least three occasions in the twentieth century—teaching its citizens in the process that their lives are worthless. Is it possible that this knowledge has been passed from generation to generation enough times that most Russians are now born with it and this is why they are born with a Bangladesh-level life expectancy? Is it also possible that other post-Soviet states, by breaking off from Moscow, have reclaimed some of their ability to hope, and this is why even Russia’s closest cultural and geographic cousins, such as Belarus and Ukraine, aren’t dying off as fast? If so, Russia is dying of a broken heart—also known as cardiovascular disease.

 

September 2, 2014, 4:45 p.m.

 

 

 

[Zaz_pi]

Cemu ovo propagadno smece od clanka?

Za vreme Hruscova je poceo pada fertilnost koja je bukvalno dostigla vrhunac kada je Staljin umro i za vreme celog perioda Hruscova je padala. Da bi se stabilizovala za vreme Breznjeva i nije se nesto narocito menjala do raspada SSSR. Postoji razlog i on je zajednicki svim zemaljama-nagla urbanizacija. Mogao je doticni da postavi pitanje zasto u Nemackoj, Italiji ili Spaniji je fertilnost manja od ruske?

Inace je Rusija 2013 imala prvi put pozitivan odnos radjanje-smrt od 1991. Sto se za Japan i Nemacku ne moze nikako reci.

Mogao bi da objasni i pad populacije u Baltickim zemljama koji je daleko veci % nego u Rusiji. Inace jedan od razloga zasto je populacija u Rusiji pala tokom '90ih se poklapa sa tim razlogom na Baltiku.

Tacno je da SAD imaju bolju fertilnost u odnosu na Rusiju, daleko bolju u odnosu na Nemace ili Japance, ali i to ce se menjati. Razlog je za to suburbia, tj. zivot na obodu gradova u kucama a ne u stambenim blokovima. Ali, to imai svoje mane, koje donosi ratove, a zove se jeftina nafta, mora puno da se putuje. Inace ceo ekonomski model SAD je zasnovan na suburbi. Tako npr. Rusija, koja ima oko 1/2 SAD populacije, trosi 5-6 puta manje nafte od SAD iako imaju daleko vece rezerve. U stvari, po glavi stanovnika Rusija trosi manje nafte i od Nemacke., mislim i Japana.

Edited September 3, 2014 by Zaz_pi

[Turnbull]

Pa da te nerviram, Zazek.

[Аврам Гојић]

[Zaz_pi]

Pa da te nerviram, Zazek.

 

Zumbulle, kako ti kazes.

[Verterdegete]

Pa jebote, jel to samo Amerikanci imaju predgradja i voze kola? SAD, Nemacka i Japan imaju vecu potrosnju nafte pre svega zbog toga sto imaju jace privrede, pa su im i zahtevi za resursima veci.

[Turnbull]

Realno, ona povezivanje sa totlaitarizmom je overkill, ali tekst jeste zanimljiv i mislim da ga ne treba lako otpisati samo kao još jednu stavku u prepucavanju Rusi vs Ameri.

 

Inače, jedna sveža vest iz majčice Rusije. Moj jako dobar prijatelj, inače rusofil i antiamerikanac, vodio klince na matematičko takmičenje u Rusiju i vratio se sa rečima - Rusiju može da voli samo onaj ko u njoj nikad nije bio, ili nije bio dalje od Moskve ili Pitera. Držali ih u nekom kampu deset dana, i strancima bio zabranjen izlaz iz kampa. Ima još detalja, ali nije stig'o da mi ispriča.

[kobni zelaya]

Kako zabranjen izlaz iz kampa? Pa što se nije pokupio i izašao iz kampa?  Mislim, sigurno da tamo postoje likovi koji bi mogli tako nešto da zamisle, ali ko može da ti zabrani kretanje? Prvi put čujem za tako nešto.

[Turnbull]

Ne znam kako, ali tako. On je bio vođa ekipe klinaca, i nije mu padalo na pamet da eksperimentiše. Inače govori ruski, tako da je isključen jezički nesporazum ili išta slično.

[Аврам Гојић]

Meni i svima iz Trećeg sveta su u Švajcarskoj zabranili kretanje jer su rekli da "imaju loša iskustva sa ljudima iz siromašnih zemalja, dođu pa traže azil". Ko se ogluši, gubi pravo na smeštaj na seminaru