Too Few Babies? Russians Debate Meaning Of Life
© Alexei Druzhinin
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It is really funny how the same debate is running in circles in nations so drastically different, like India and Russia.
To put the subject of that debate in very simple words, people are trying to decide: what size of population is good or bad for the nation, and what the governments are supposed to do about it.
I’d hate to go back to the memorable situation in India in the mid-1970-s (yes, that’s about population control), so let me quote some lines from this week’s publication in The Pioneer. Says Kajleen Kaur, Assistant Professor of University of Delhi: India boasts a demographic dividend, with a working-age population (15–64 years) of around 67 per cent, which can propel economic growth. But, he goes on, the economy languishes with high unemployment, which fails to realise that dividend. Finally, he notes, India’s youth account for 83 per cent of the unemployed workforce, and something has to be done.
Russia’s problem seems to be the exact opposite. Namely, too few babies, which is supposed to be a huge national problem. Panicked politicians are scaring people with predictions, that, instead of reaching 150 million, Russia’s population may go down to 120 million one day. So – and here is the catch – the government has to be proactive about it.
Being proactive means, for most people, allocating the money, and for other people it means the need of constant ideological pressure on population to have more babies. Both methods are producing problems.
My own daughter Anna has just enlightened me on the exact details of what I see for myself almost every weekend, when her family invades my country house, filling it with incredible noise. Anna, like every mother of two, has received the so-called “mother’s capital” equal to approximately 690 thousand rupees (is that 6.9 lakhs? Hate figures). She can spend it on purchasing a flat or a house, or paying for kindergarten, or buying toys, etc. She also gets additional “medical money”, which makes any treatment for her and my two grandsons virtually free at least in Moscow. Her workplace waits for her for three years after childbirth, and she gets a small pension from her former employer in the meantime. And don’t forget free milk, juice and other baby food from local dispensaries, to add. She is bringing all that to my house in heaps.
Anna enjoys the same benefits as every other mother of two in Russia. And still the birth rates are currently down.
Now, for ideology. A great campaign against abortions has been going on for already several years. One may think we are in Republican America here, but the Russian Orthodox Church has always been in complete agreement with our American brothers on that subject, anyway.
Cheap TV series are full of dull repetitions of the same plots, when a young lady keeps her baby against all material odds, and is happy about it.
Also, cities are competing against each other for higher birth rates. And that’s exactly here where the interesting discussions crop up all the time. The Independent from Moscow has recently published a scathing article about the need to close down a TV show called Mother At 16. It was a lady Senator, Julia Lazutkina, who called for the closure of that show, saying that the local officials have actually started paying underage schoolgirls for giving birth.
But then, the local officials are only following instructions from the Ministry of Labor. There are other instructions, too. As a result at least 40 regions of Russia (out of more than 80) have started luring ladies from neighboring regions to come over to their land to give birth. That makes the enterprising local authorities look good, but is not in the least changing the national statistics.
When people start overdoing their previously rational effort, the whole construction collapses. Now there is a raging debate starting all over Russia about the very idea of waging a national campaign for more babies. That’s how we all learn that in fact abortions are going steadily down and down, and still the birth rates are not what some officials want.
And that’s how we also learn, that it’s not the low birth rate that is causing the current labor shortages. It’s the wrong model of education that does it. There is not enough of graduates of mid-level technical colleges, that is the problem.
There is a famous lady blogger with millions of followers, called Anastasia Mironova, who loves saying terrible things, currently not supposed to be said. Why don’t you leave mothers and fathers alone to decide how they want to live, says she. Why Europe is not seriously worried about similarly low birth rates, but is worried about millions of migrants invading its shores? What does it mean – enough or not enough people for a nation? Who decides about that?
Here we have a situation that has not yet been seriously considered, but may very well dominate the debate of the oncoming new era for all the world. It’s a question of what governments should, but especially should not do to nations and whole continents. These governments probably should learn not to see billions of humans as passive object of social engineering.
We only know, by now, that the world is entering some kind of a new era. We have no clear idea about what will make that new era. But we have noticed that the end of the previous era, and that’s our today, have been marked by the wildest attempts to manipulate people into something that is supposed to be good for them.
To remind, people are either basically left (revolutionary) or right (conservative). The former are the ones who sincerely think that parties, governments or maybe secret societies are supposed to subject all and sundry to all kind of pressure so as to improve people’s thinking and acting. While the latter are the ones who think that the current state of thinking and acting is the result of centuries of development, and hence should be respected.
When you want to regulate the number of people in your country or in the world in general, and do it all the time on the on-off basis, that makes you very leftist, and intrusive, and maybe dangerous. And the current Russian debate on that subject is, basically, about the meaning of life and the right of human beings of being themselves and live their own life.
A lot of terrible problems of today’s world have been caused by the extreme left idealists who decided that now they own technologies that may influence people like never before. You may even change human race physically, making it transhuman. International medical lobby is the most obvious carrier of that delusion, but then there are other similar cases. Like, maybe, climate.
The world in general has already spent 10.4 trillion dollars on influencing global climate, with all its regular changes, says Professor Nikolai Nikolaev of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. The alternative to that approach, so far, have been the climate skepticism, as in “don’t touch nature itself”. But how about the old Russian way, says the professor, of gently adapting human existence to changing natural realities, as in planting forests and draining swamps? Russia did it well even a hundred years ago, without trying to upend the whole world.
That approach may well work wonders in other issues, without habitually driving women crazy about how many babies they should have.
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com
