RUSSIA, 10 YEARS AFTER THE FALL
Exactly 10 years ago Dec. 8, ignoring the great majority of opinion in his own country but following the recommendations of his U.S. advisers, President Boris Yeltsin of Russia dissolved the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This anniversary is an appropriate time to briefly inquire into how Russia -- once the engine of the world’s second largest economy -- is succeeding in its transformation from socialism to the magical marketplace and ever-filled cornucopia of capitalism.
In essence, the economic decline of Russia has continued without interruption since 1991, and the social toll, except for a small minority who have gotten very rich, is appalling. Russia today is “10 to 20 years behind” where it was a decade ago, according to economist Oleg Bogomolov of Moscow’s Academy of Sciences, who might be termed an optimist. Conservative estimates of Russia’s gross domestic product indicate it has dropped over 30% since the old socialist days. Industrial output is down 35%. Over 30% of the population lives in deep poverty. Many more are just scraping by. Crime is rampant, corruption rife. If current statistics hold, the country’s population will wither from 145 million today to 55 million in 75 years, reports the Institute of Social and Political Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In the former Soviet Union as a whole, plus the one-time socialist East European countries, a combined total of 18 million children now live in serious poverty, according to the UN Children’s Fund. This means they survive on less than the equivalent of $2.15 a day for everything -- food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, entertainment -- the works. Another 60 million kids in the former socialist bloc live on less than $4.30 a day. Russia alone now has a child poverty rate of 23.2%--several times higher than a decade ago before the transition to capitalism. The infant death rate (16.5 per 1000 infants one year or younger) is 200-300% higher than for comparable developed countries.
The newspaper Moscow Times reported earlier this year that Russia’s death rate in 2000 rose to 15.3 per 1,000 people, “the highest in Europe and the highest in Russia since the end of World War II.... For adults age 20 to 29, the death rate has jumped 60% over the past decade.” The average age of death for men, which was 69 years during the final year of the USSR, fell to 59.8 years last year--11 to 15 years earlier than average male deaths in developed countries.
According to polls taken in anticipation of the Dec. 8 anniversary, Russia’s largest public opinion agencies concluded that 55% of the population preferred life before the establishment of capitalism. This is down from 64% two years ago. The opinion researchers don’t attribute the decline to improved living conditions or to infatuation with “really existing” capitalism, but to the dying off of the older generation which lived most of its life in the USSR, and to the loss of hope (only 22% still have it) that it was any longer possible for the Soviet Union to be restored. Another poll taken last spring showed that after 10 years, “two-thirds of Russians still look fondly on Vladimir Lenin,” the leader of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.