Sochi May Be A Triumph, But It Masks A Deep Decline

This past summer two of my very close friends arrived here from Russia. Both teachers in their mid-30’s, they’re married, highly educated and living in their own small home. Like an overwhelming majority of Russians, they live hundreds if not thousands of miles away from Moscow, in the central part of the nation. To get an idea of Russia’s vastness, though my friends live midway between Europe and the Pacific, their Asian home is as far away from Moscow as mine in Princeton is from San Francisco.

Russian troops march proudly at a Moscow parade in the summer of 2013.
In the event of a real war, there are few who could replace them.

On a warm July evening at an Upper East Side diner, we exchanged warm hugs, sat down and ordered our food. We got through the pleasantries and soon got talking about our favorite issue: Politics. Michael and Victoria (not their real names), people well versed in the complexities of political and economic theory, got right to the point. Michael spoke up first. “If you want to understand Russia, and really get to the heart of what is ailing it. I can tell you. The state and nation as a whole is not in decline. It is dying.”

Not exactly what I was expecting. Usually, Michael and Victoria, when addressing their homeland, will use more complicated language and analogies. But this time they were both particularly blunt.

“This winter the Sochi Olympics, in which the state has invested over $40 billion, may or may not be a huge success. It might be marred by terrorism. It might, for a moment, project a rediscovered sense of Russian confidence and even resurgence. But don’t believe it for a second. The entire state and nation, and I know they are clean different things, know they are living on borrowed time.”

Both Michael and Anna laid it all out for me. I felt like I had gone to the doctor for a simple physical, only to be called into the office for news that I was terminally ill. My Russian friends spoke of the sheer nepotism, the corruption, the civic decline and the emigration of the youth and educated. They said that people we not only voting with their feet, they were voting with their restraint and their contraceptives. “Regardless of what anyone is saying in or about Russia these days,” Victoria stated, “no one, not in the heart of European Russia, not in the snowy cities of Siberia or in Vladivostok on the rocky Pacific coast, are having children. It’s like that movie Children of Men where humanity sees its end in its lack of regeneration. Well, it’s not that we cannot reproduce; under the circumstances, we just do not want to.”

The couple was right, of course. Though different agencies worldwide argue over the exactness of their projections, there is no doubt that Russia’s population is in deep and steady decline. And it’s been a long decline, one that, according to most sources (from the U.N. to the U.S. Census Bureau) started in the early 1990’s.

How serious is this decline? According to the United Nations, Russia, by 2025 could have a population not exceeding 115-117 million people. This is a state that is, by any historical standard, gargantuan in size, covering an area that spans 11 time zones and more than twice the land cover of the continental United States.

Michael puts it in a more straightforward way. “Look at it this way. In 2025, which is not very long from now, Russia’s total population could be about the same or less than the combined, projected populations of three U.S. states: California, New York and Florida.”

My Russian friends claim that these trends are so unsettling that few Russians want to talk about it, though the numbers are undeniable. But more disturbing, according to Victoria, is that you can already see the trends at work. “Classes are shrinking. Children are still in the streets and playing in the fields on warm days, but there are considerably less of them. You visit friends and family and there are few siblings.”

I brought up the Russian President, Putin. Michael rolled his eyes, and acknowledged that Putin projects a physical presence of strength, and he rules with ruthless determination. But even Putin, a great admirer of Stalin, could never get away with repeating Stalin’s sins. “Stalin killed 30 to 50 million Russians; Putin would never do that. Do people die under his rule? Yes, it has happened. But in mass numbers? No, not Russians anyway. There are too few of us these days to endure massacres, and Putin knows this. He knows that if he ever gave the order, say during a Moscow demonstration, for the police or army to open automatic fire and kill 10,000, or even 1000, he’d be finished.”

It is this simple calculus, according to my friends, that explains why Putin and his allies still make careful use of Russia’s dilapidated court and prison system, instead of reestablishing a vast network of labor and death camps that defined Stalin’s reign of terror. “And again, everybody in Russia is aware of this. It’s not that Putin places tremendous value on human life; he’s no humanitarian. But he does not want to be seen, ever, taking part in some act of Russian demographic suicide.”

Russia is also a political mess. Interestingly enough, its political system on the national level is designed on the American template. It has an elected president with real term limitations, a supreme constitutional court with the powers of judicial review, and a bicameral legislature/parliament. Even the national legislature mimics the U.S. Congress, with a lower house representing people and districts, and an upper house representing states and regions. But that is on paper; in reality, it barely operates. Most policymaking is with Putin.

Michael put it this way. “Do you want to know how weak Russia is? Could you imagine if, say, out of your 50 states, there were entire regions, some approaching the size of Pennsylvania, that were completely out of the government’s control? And then imagine that the states of Oregon, Maine and Louisiana ruled themselves and had laws that were completely contrary to the U.S. Constitution, though they acknowledged some form of Washington’s supremacy. That is Russia today, and it is getting worse, not better.”

I asked about Russia’s vast mineral, gas and oil wealth and its acknowledged untapped deposits. Again, my friends recognized this, but reminded me that wealth is locked up amongst the oligarchs and their extended families and networks. The oligarchs, if you do not know, are the few dozen business billionaires Russia has produced since the Soviet fall in 1991. And even these riches may not sustain the fragmented, fragile Russian economy as fuel prices may deflate in the near future due to dramatically increased U.S. and Canadian output.

So what is the long-term prognosis, I asked them? Will Russia descend into Civil War, or break up peacefully into several independent states as the Soviet Union did?

“The end may come, it may, but it will not be along Soviet lines.” Victoria warned. Russia’s internal borders are not as neatly defined as the larger ones of the Soviet Union, and even with those borders, there were problems and ambiguities. Modern day Russia is such an ethnic checkerboard, there are very few regions where large, proud non-Russian minorities are not present. So if disintegration comes, most think that European Russia may go one way, but the southern mixed regions and Siberia may go another. It could get very violent.”

I looked at them as if they were speculating on the fantastic. They laughed along with me, but gave an interesting warning. “Remember when you were a kid, and the Soviet Union hung over your head like a heavy storm cloud? If anyone would have told you in high school, in the 1980’s, that the entire Soviet Empire would simply collapse in a period of weeks, you would have never believed them. But that’s exactly what happened.”

Michael and Victoria are proud to be Russian. They look back with admiration and pride on centuries of language, art, literature, architecture, scientific discovery, culture and resistance to conquerors like Napoleon and Hitler. Still, they’re dead-serious in their realism. “There will always be Russians,” Victoria said. “But a single Russian state? A few years ago, I would have said I don’t know if it will last. Now I think, it will only be a matter of time.”

I went away from our meeting glad that I had seen them, but filled with some dread. The world is a crazy place, to be sure, and the United States cannot and should not get itself involved in operations like preserving vast nation-states in decline. But then again, I thought, most declining nation-states do not have Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.