Chapter V. The Russian catastrophe
In the Soviet Union there was no sex, but there was love;
In modern Russia, conversely, there is no love, yet there is sex.
Author
While the family relations situation in the West can be designated with the word “crisis,” in Russia’s case the more appropriate word is “catastrophe.” There is an old Russian saying: “what’s good for a Russian is death to a German.” This saying is reversible, however: what’s good to a German is death to a Russian. The current state of Russian reality is proof of the truth of this saying. Having returned to the path of capitalism, which had almost destroyed the Russian state once before, today’s Russia not only reproduced the most negative aspects of Western capitalism, but, in purely Russian tradition, developed them to extremes. The main aggregate indicator of this strategic mistake is the relentless decline of the Russian Federation’s population; since the collapse of the USSR it declined by almost 10 million. According to the pessimistic scenario of the UN forecast, by the year 2050 this trend will bring Russia’s population down to 96 million; according to the optimistic scenario – to 113 million. Russia’s own State Committee for Statistics forecasts values of 77 million in 2050 (in the pessimistic scenario) or 123 million people (the optimistic scenario).[1] However, unlike the Western countries, where the decline of the indigenous population (of the population as a whole in Germany’s case) is accompanied for the time being by the growth of average lifespan, in Russia it is accompanied by a shortening of the average lifespan - both for women and especially for men. At present this gap separating Russian life spans from those in the West is about 10 years for women and almost 20 years for men. The English magazine The Economist commented on this situation as follows: “Many rich countries have comparably low birth rates, though; it is Russia’s death rate that is beyond compare.”[2] It suffices to look carefully at Table V.1 to admit the truth of the English magazine’s appraisal.
By the way, this table shows that under the Soviet regime, the average life expectancy almost doubled compared to tsarist Russia over a very brief historical period.
In other words, two aggregate indicators are working against the life delta – the criterion of progress.
The reasons for this self-destruction are numerous; however, the family factor holds a “place of honor” among them. Let us resort to statistics again. From Table V.2, as well as from the graph, one sees that the trends were showing already during the Soviet period. Capitalism accelerated the trend. In divorce rates, Russia already left behind all European states, the USA and Japan; as for the ratio of divorces to marriages, it is rapidly approaching 100%. Should Russia cross this plank, irreversible processes will be launched.
The situation with out-of-wedlock babies is still somewhat better than in the West. In 2003 the proportion of such children was 30% - two times higher than at the start of capitalist restoration. In Soviet times the figure was around 11%.
Table V.3 shows figures that are no less eloquent. One sees in the first column that Russia’s birth rate is lower than that of any Western country. Let me remind you that the minimum rate required for “increased-scale reproduction” is 2.1. Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s self-styled “familist,” i.e. expert on family problems, notes in this connection that “multiple monogamy” (that is, marriage subsequent to divorce) does not increase the birth rate. The same is true of non-registered marriages (“co-habiting couples”, in my terminology); they, too, are for the most part childless.[3]
Russia is also way ahead of the West in maternal mortality (the second column) – by multiples, by factors of 5, 6, or 7. Note that official statistics distort reality by a factor of nearly two; however, this is also true of other countries. Same thing with the infant mortality rate: it is 2-3 times higher than in the West.
The health of the children and mothers is also a problem. Here are some excerpts from the Russian press (pro-bourgeois publications, in fact – not the opposition ones):
◊ Russia’s Ministry of Health admitted at the end of 2002 that 60% of Russian children are afflicted with diseases of the digestive tract, neuroses and distortions of motion coordination. According to the data of the Russian section of the World Health Organization, only one child out of ten is born healthy (italics mine. – A.B.) This is the result of the mothers’ sad state of health; half of all pregnant women are malnourished. (Moskovsky komsomolets, 2 August 2004.)
◊ According to Olga Sharapova, the Director of the Health Ministry’s Department of the medico-social problems of family, motherhood and childhood, there is currently only 1.32 child per one Russian woman (and only 32% of the children are born in the normal way). Currently about 80% of pregnant women have some kind of pathology. For example, the number of pregnant women with anemia has increased by 50% (http://mednovosti.ru/news/2005/03/17/russia/).
◊ Statistical data show that in Russia one couple in four is unable to have children in the natural fashion (Argumenty I facty, 13 April 2005).
◊ Valery Voevodin, spokesperson for the Department of Social Protection of the Ministry for Labor and Social Development, announced: “Currently the number of invalids in Russia keeps growing and reached 11,400,000 people. There are very many invalids among children, currently 685,000”
(http://mednovosti.ru/news/2004/12/09/invalid/).
◊ Families with children comprise the greater part of the poor. Depending on the indicators of well-being used to estimate poverty, they comprise 50-60% of all poverty-stricken families, and they account for 70-80% of the income deficit, which indicates the very dire poverty of this type of family (Demoscope Weekly, #195 – 196, 21 March - 3 April 2005).
◊ 22 of 30 million of Russia’s children live in families with incomes near the subsistence minimum or lower (Moskovsky komsomolets, 6 July 2005).
◊ According to statistics, in Russia annually 2 million children are subjected to various forms of violence, and one in ten dies as a result, while 2,000 kill themselves. Over 50,000 such children run away each year. Boys get beaten three times more often than girls. Two thirds of the physically abused children are pre-schoolers. 10% of the children who are hospitalized after severe beatings die. The number of children who get beaten increases every year. According to surveys conducted by human rights organizations, about 60% of children experience violence in their families, and 30% experience it in schools (Moskovsky komsomolets, 16 April 2005).
◊ Another extremely important problem: the number of orphans who have live parents has increased catastrophically in Russia and reached almost five million (Rossiiskaya gazeta, 2 Nov. 2004).
No commentary is needed here. One can say only that even one of the above-quoted figures is sufficient to justify overthrowing any government and subject its leaders to severe punishment, but that is a separate topic.
The social consequences of the critical situation in the sphere of family-marriage include one not-quite-usual one, which the psychologist Olga Makhovskaya calls “female marriage migration.” It’s that women who despaired of building normal family life in Russia prefer to escape the country by any means necessary and marry a foreigner. There are no statistical data on this matter, but even just my own empirical experience of living in the West enables me to guess that the figure is in the tens of thousands. This applies to men too, by the way. According to official data from Russia’s State Committee for Statistics, between 1997 and 2003 481,036 people left Russia for countries outside the CIS (mainly Germany). Understandably, this “contingent” consists mostly of the best educated young people.
Apart from legal emigration, there is the illegal traffic in girls for “working the streets” of the Western world. Two or three years ago I read somewhere that in Western Europe alone the number of prostitutes from Russia and Ukraine reached perhaps 500,000. There are no exact statistical data of course, but there are some terrifying estimates. Russian sociologists estimate that in the Krasnodar region alone there are over 800,000 potential victims of the sex traffic. That is the number of women willing to go to work in Europe or the USA, despite the risk of ending up in the “red light district.” The sociologists are certain that across Russia as a whole such women number in the millions.[4]
From just the things said so far it should be obvious that in Russia the demolition of one of the most important structures of the state is underway: the family. With rare exceptions, the sociologists, demographers and “familists” cite as the main cause the country’s transition to the capitalist way of development. Lost as a consequence were all the advantages accorded to the family by the socialist system – in accordance with the Constitution of the USSR. Unlike the current Constitution which merely postulates that “motherhood and childhood, the family are under the protection of the state” (Article 38), the Soviet Constitution of 1977 specified in detail:
The state cares for the family through creating and developing a broad network of children’s institutions, the organization and improvement of everyday necessities and food industries, the payment of stipends on the occasion of childbirth, offering grants and privileges to families with many children, as well as other kinds of grants and assistance to families (Article 53).
In the Soviet years, any post-graduate student could afford to put two children in kindergarten (about 25 rubles for two, out of a stipend of 90 rubles). Today, even a research associate of the most senior rank (with the degree of Doctor of Science, rank of Professor, etc.) cannot afford to put even one child in kindergarten with his salary of 3,000 rubles per month (a reasonably decent kindergarten costs about 9,000 rubles). Alexander Plotnikov, Director of the “Russian Center for Youth Family Policy,” said in a press interview: “In Russia today about 69% of young families find themselves below the poverty line. The grants for childcare until age 1.5 don’t even cover 5% of the sums spent on the infant by the parents.”[5]
Apart from the benefits mentioned already, young people who got married were accorded privileges in the acquisition of dwelling, low-rate loans for setting up the household, kindergarten and nursery places at symbolic prices, and they could also receive an apartment (often for free) from the state or from the enterprise that employed them. Practically all these privileges have been abolished by now, and this affects the demographic processes.
It’s not just that, though. In today’s Russia, values have become re-assessed after the capitalist fashion. There was a discussion above of morals, or rather the absence thereof, in the top stratum of the bourgeois society in the West. In its Russian implementation, this amorality has taken on the character of a bacchanal reproduced by all the mass media. The tone is set by the 5-6% of the population who managed to jump to the top of the ladder, becoming the ruling economic and political class of Russia. It is unequalled in the world in its cynicism. Perfectly absent from this milieu are the notions of honor, conscience, justice; perfectly emasculated is the content of the notions of family, children, love. The “rags to riches” mutants not only robbed the population materially; that, as the saying goes, is only half the tragedy. They corrupted the population’s consciousness, which proved to be easily manipulated due to the dramatic decline of education in the country (millions of children don’t go to school) and, especially, the decline of culture. Television and cinema fell into the hands of the mob structures of show business, which now bring to the masses not light but darkness: vulgarity, pornography, baseness. The bohemian lifestyle of the elite is cultivated and promoted by the mass media; the populace eats it all up and starts decaying from within. Likewise copied, of course, are their standards of the so-called family life, their notions of relations between man and woman. They are essentially no different from the notions held by their class brethren in the West. To them, too, family is business; “love,” naturally, is a commodity; children, if they do appear, are playthings; divorces and matches are a form of transferring or accumulating funds. However, the problem is – I want to repeat it again – that the Russian elite has carried it all to absurdity, which is, to make it worse, boorishly advertised in all bourgeois mass media.
In one of my publicistic articles some time ago I touched on the topic of Russian oligarchs and – in this context – their wives-mistresses. In order to have some idea of the latter, I quote here a small segment from that article, dealing with the “ladies”:
Among this mass of vacationers, one cannot help noticing the multitudes of beautiful young women: for the most part these are mistresses of the oligarchs and semi-oligarchs. Their wives are also gorgeous, since both the wives and the mistresses come more often than not from the modeling business. (The modeling business is an “artistic” form of pimping and prostitution disguised as photography-and-fashion business. It is a “trip to the short streetwalk,” where the “ladies” justify this art.) This special stratum of ladies “pleasant in all respects” has been proliferating lately with amazing speed. They are in demand, and therefore “supply” doesn’t keep waiting. After all, it is a law of sorts. The lasses come for the most part from the boondocks; this is where the pimps find them, offering foreign tours and the glamorous life. These women direct wonders of improbable energy at the attainment of one goal: to capture to a rich “sugar daddy” in Moscow. Many succeed. It is these provincial bipeds who are the beneficiaries of the Russian economy, on which the state reports so chirpily. It is they who are bedecked with diamonds, they who are considered “the fair face of Russia.” It is they who serve as company on the trips abroad to the resorts mentioned above. The wealth of Russia is spent on “the fair face of Russia.” Think about it! However, the status of a mistress who can be bought off with candies and gifts doesn’t satisfy some of them. They resort to blackmail, show wonders of skill in setting all kinds of traps, which the “hard workers” seek to escape by marrying these viruses. (This latter here is not a swear word, but rather their exact classification in the biological table of ranks.) Viruses are creatures that have no life of their own. They need a “body” to devour and exist at its expense. The idea is to receive everything without producing anything. As a result, many sponsors divorce their non-model wives and marry these bipeds. It decides nothing, of course, in this kind of marriages. Life goes on! Before long, the hydra becomes a “centipede.” All these millipedes are friends with each other, despite having one source in common that provides for their needs. Their strategic objectives are to extract their relatives from the boondocks, provide them with apartments in Moscow and other goodies, and then apply every effort to bring about emigration from Russia (this is up to the “sugar daddy’s” devices). They cannot be called people – it would be incorrect, since their goals are determined by instincts on the development level of viruses and bacteria. They exist at the expense of the organism they penetrated; it enables them to flourish. In this kind of marriages, they are not interested in having children, starting a family. These things cannot interest them in principle; for them it is merely the process of procreation, vegetation, so to say. These organisms pursue the purely biological goal of survival. It cannot even be defined from the perspective of human notions of good or bad. After all, we do not condemn a lion for being a lion; it’s the same with this infection. Its emergence is a regularity, since it is a product of today’s society. Even if these viruses do give birth to young such as themselves (translated in the language of morals, this is a form of hold or blackmail), they themselves do not nourish or raise the children. Different goals are pursued here; different motive forces are at work. All instincts of these bacteria-ladies are directed toward a life of luxury, which they associate with expensive purchases, with entertainment at resorts in those same Alps. Their intellect doesn’t bear talking about: compared to them, infusorians are “academicians.” Thus, the sponsor himself falls under the control of the whole provincial infusorian family. If he is not a multimillionaire, he goes broke; if he is very rich, he pays them off with a million bucks or two and bails out through divorce. I’m not inventing all this; this phenomenon has been described in the Russian press. One article in MK was titled simply The Family Dupe Game.
I touched on this object merely in order to show that within the top stratum of Russia’s capitalist class there has formed a whole stratum of genuine parasites and viruses who suck the parasites’ juices (for clarification of terms, see the biological glossary). [6]
These Russians wenches are unique in that they don’t even realize the degree of their degradation. For evidence, I can refer to a book titled «Casual» by one Oksana Robsky, advertised by a like diva in the Nezavisimaya gazeta. One quote will suffice to give an idea what kind of dough this “writer” is made of. I quote from same newspaper: “To my daughter, - writes Oksana Robsky, - the fact that cooking is done by the cooking woman and cleaning by the cleaning woman is as natural as that the sun rises, and that is why her daughter only asks Father Frost to make sure “that all stay alive and that everything’s well.”
And here is the ending of the article, which characterizes the correspondent: “This is what the happy ending of the novel looks like: “Kostya agreed to finance this project. And all other projects in my life as well…” Instead of “they swore to live long and happily and die on the same day,” you have this: “finance all projects.” And you know what? There is simple human happiness in this. Of the everyday kind.” (italics mine – A.B.)
The correspondent, same as her heroine, is unable to understand that parasitism doesn’t belong to the category of happiness, and if some creature experiences happiness due to its parasitism, then it is not a human being, but rather elementary scum, dregs of society, which must be combated.
* * *
The catastrophic state of the family sphere is sensed by the majority of Russia’s population – except, of course, for its top strata. The problem is also realized by the specialists in this field. So what solutions are proposed?
They are all based on the classical Russian what-if-ism (should we do this and this, then it will work out… same as always). For example, many pin their hopes on the government finally taking some effective measures to halt the process of decay of the family. What they mean is increased subsidies for single mothers, various grants for poor families, etc. They expect that before the end of the President’s current term in 2008 additional funds will be assigned to this sphere. Supposedly some programs are already starting to be implemented in the family and social sphere. Such “historical optimism” is akin to the naiveté of kids in kindergarten. Firstly, it’s no use having illusions about the current President of Russia. When he became acting President on 3 January 2000, his very first act was to veto the Act “On State Support for Multi-child Families,” which had been adopted by the Duma and approved by the Federation Council. Secondly, these specialists apparently don’t understand that no matter how much one adds to the budget item “social assistance” (0.4% of the budget and 0.1% of GDP in 2003), it will not be a cardinal solution to the problem. The problem cannot be resolved in principle given the country’s current budget which does not exceed the combined incomes of the two richest men in America. I think that these specialists recognize this obvious truth in their souls. They find consolation, however, in the fact that the family is also disintegrating in the West; that in the West the population is declining as well. The already mentioned “familist” Antonov believes, for example, that it is a common problem: what goes on is “the dying out of humanity due to “parental impotence”, i.e. the absence of desire to have children – which is brought about, by the way, by the general economic situation in advanced countries” (ibid.) I have come across similar reasoning in the works of the physicist Sergei P. Kapitsa who has been researching demographic problems in recent years.
In actual fact this is not so. “Dying out” is a distinct possibility for Russia only. In the West, as mentioned already, this process is compensated by migration flows from Third World countries. These people are not clamoring to get into Russia – for obvious reasons, for they realize that Russia is little different from their own states. As for “mankind” as a whole, it has no intention of “dying out.” What’s happening in the world is merely the slowing down of the planet’s population growth. In some spots this “slowing down” is accomplished by the “cannibalistic policy” (in Professor Antonov’s expression) of the government of China. Such words are usually used to characterize China and everything that has to do with it by “democrat-liberals” around the world. The same policy, however, can be characterized differently: as the scientifically justified planning policy of the Chinese government in the area of demographics and family relations. At least for the time being it is precisely China that has the lowest divorce rate (2.1 in 2003).[7]
In Russia, on the other hand, not only is there no scientifically developed policy – the government has no policy whatsoever (and not only in the area of family relations). As a result, the country is being depopulated (according to the sparing UN forecast, the population will drop to 80 million by the end of the century).
The reader must have noticed that in writing about Russia, I did not examine the problems of marriage and family from the scientific or ideological perspective as I did with respect to the West. The reason is this: Russia’s own specialists ignore the theoretical aspects of family and everything connected to it. The already mentioned psychologist Olga Makhovskaya proclaimed in an interview: “The category of love and happiness has almost nothing to do with family. I’m in favor of presence of love, but it is the energetic minimum for the creation of family, merely an excuse. Fine children are the criterion of a normal family. Family always means launching a child into orbit.”[8]
This psychologist fails to understand that there are never any fine children in the absence of love and happiness. However, Russia today does indeed have more important things to worry about than happiness and love. The main concern is survival.
I assure you: under the current social-economic system it is not only impossible for the family to survive in Russia – Russia itself won’t survive. The only recipe for survival is a cardinal change in the vector of social development.
[1] See: DaVanzo and Grammich. Dire Demographics: Population Trends in the Russian Federation.
[2] The Economist, October 2nd, 2004, 36.
[3] Argumenty i facty, 5 March 2005.
[4] Novye izvestia, 25 March 2005.
[5] Moskovsky komsomolets, 19 March 2005.
[6] Battler. Oligarchs in the clutches of dollargasm. – www.alexbattler.com.
[7] See: China Statistical Yearbook. 2004, 902.
[8] Rossiiskaya gazeta, 2 Nov. 2004
On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)