Kstinovo, Russia – Welcome to Kstinovo, population one.
Antonina Makarova, 78, spends her days watching news and soap operas in her peeling wooden dacha, the only inhabited structure in two lanes of sagging cottages that once were a village.
Her nearest neighbor, 80-year-old Maria Belkova, lives in adjacent Sosnovitsy, population two. But Belkova can’t hear anymore, and all in all, Makarova finds the television better company.
The Tver region, along the upper reaches of the Volga River 130 miles north of Moscow, is dotted with more than 1,400 villages, such as Kstinovo, marked “nezhiloye,” or depopulated. Since 1989, the number of people here has shrunk by about 250,000 to about 1.4 million, with deaths outnumbering births more than 2 to 1.
The Tver region is far from unusual in this country.
Russia is the only major industrial nation that is losing population. Its people are succumbing to one of the world’s fastest-growing AIDS epidemics, resurgent tuberculosis, rampant cardiovascular disease, alcohol and drug abuse, smoking, suicide and the lethal effects of unchecked pollution.
In addition, abortions outpaced births last year by more than 100,000. An estimated 10 million Russians of reproductive age are sterile because of botched abortions or poor health.
Many parents in more prosperous urban areas say they can’t afford homes large enough for the number of children they’d like to have.
The former Soviet Union, with about 300 million people, was the world’s third-most populous country, behind China and India. Slightly more than half of its citizens lived in Russia. The country has lost the equivalent of a city of 700,000 people every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Russia is now home to only 142 million people.
The losses have been disproportionately male. At the height of its power, the Soviet Union’s people lived almost as long as Americans. But now, the average Russian man can expect to live only about 59 years, 16 years less than an American man and 14 less than a Russian woman.
Sergei Mironov, chairman of the upper house of Russia’s parliament, said last year that if the trend didn’t change, the population would fall to 52 million by 2080.
“There will no longer be a great Russia,” he said. “It will be torn apart piece by piece and finally cease to exist.”
That may be an overstatement, but there are serious questions about whether Russia will be able to hold on to its far eastern lands along the border with China over the next century or field an army, let alone a workforce to support the ill and the elderly.
Russian officials, flush with revenue from record prices for the country’s oil exports, have started to respond. President Vladimir Putin this year pledged payments of $111 a month to mothers who elected to have a second child, plus a nest egg of $9,260 to be used for education, a mortgage or pensions.
“Russia has a huge territory, the largest territory in the world,” Putin said. “If the situation remains unchanged, there will simply be no one to protect it.”
The economic earthquake of Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism plunged tens of millions into poverty overnight and changed the value systems upon which many had planned their lives. A small minority, mostly in urban centers such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, were able to exploit the absence of rules to become fabulously wealthy.
But such a profound social transition, coming at the end of a century of war, revolution and ruthless social experimentation, condemned many more to a deep malaise.
They have proved susceptible to drinking, smoking and other habits that killed millions of Russians even in the best of times. Or they kill themselves.
Russia’s suicide rate, at about 36 per 100,000 people, is second only to that of Lithuania, according to the Serbsky National Research Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry. In some remote areas of Russia, the rate exceeds 100 per 100,000.
Some argue that the cause of Russia’s problems can be found in communism’s destruction of generations of the country’s most capable and adaptable people.
“Seventy-five years of Bolshevik life in this country led to the formation of a tribe of people which was cultivated to listen to orders and fulfill them,” said Alexander Gorelik, a St. Petersburg physician. Stalinism aimed for “the planned and gradual physical destruction of the most moral, the most creative group of the population.
“There is such a thing as a will for life. And the whole trouble is that the Russian public in general, and especially the male population, has a big deficiency in this area.”
