MOSCOW (Realist English). The HSE Institute of Demography opened America, reporting that the population of Russia will halve by the end of this century, having decreased from 146 to 70-68 million people. Such a simple conclusion can be made by anyone who knows the basics of arithmetic and reading UN and Rosstat data.
The inadequate sensation here is only the way to solve the problem. The HSE thinks that the only way to cope with extinction is to import migrants in batches of 390 thousand to 1.1 million people annually over the next 80 years. The brain of a liberal sociologist does not allow other recipes purely physically.
This is about the same logic that the Russian government has been applying to industry, technology and the consumer market for 30 years. Why produce your own when everything can be bought abroad? It looks like import substitution, when Chinese goods are imported instead of Western ones.
Some media see in such calculations some Russophobic motives and anti-Russian machinations: “They want to flood the country with foreigners.” In our opinion, nothing special, no conspiracy. The usual logic of the worm is moving assets from one end to the other (sucking out nutrients is the main process). This is a problem not only for Russia. All over the world, they are trying to solve it this way.
To solve the problem in a different way, and not byway of a worm, a completely different level of state thinking and social policy will be required. It will be necessary to build a civil society from scratch, charged with a new type of altruism. It will require a popular perception of childbirth as self-sacrifice. A full, large family as a mission. A kind of a routine everyday feat, in which not singles, but the passionate majority of citizens, the Church and the state should take part. In fact, we are talking about building a new normality, or about returning to it. Because today the norm is to live for yourself.
Demographer Yuri Krupnov described the situation very accurately:
“Making an atomic bomb is 10 times easier than making a demographic renaissance of the country. We should shudder and set a course for a new country where families with three or four children will be normal.”
