Vladmir Putin is worried. And it doesn’t have anything to do with his weird kiss of a five year-old on the campaign trail. Instead, it has to do with the fact that there aren’t nearly as many five year-olds as there used to be in Mother Russia.
In the July 31 issue of The American Conservative, economist Pavel Kohout takes up the declining population of the Russian Federation. Kobout argues that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians “seemingly prefer consumption to child bearing and rearing.” Kohout asks why the demographic charts are plummeting, even with material prosperity going up since the downfall of the Evil Empire.
Kohout places the blame on the rise of dual-income careerism in Russia, along with the vast cultural changes that accompanied the demise of the Iron Curtain. Under the gloomy days of the old regime, Kohout says:
“When coming home, a man and his wife would rarely watch TV. Of two channels, he could choose between Party Congress Live on Channel 1 and a propaganda movie on Channel 2 (or vice versa). At the end of the day there was plenty of time for the family.
“Outside of the family were hypocrisy, lies, spies, and boredom. There were no newspapers, only propaganda leaflets. There was no money, only funny paper good for shoddy products in socialist retail stores. Nothing was real; life and society felt fake. All values were debased except for one: the family, the sole place values remained genuine. Love and affection for your dearest ones survives all regimes. That’s why people had lots of children even under the conditions of relative poverty, lack of freedom, and uncertainty about the future.”
Marxism was a false god, a cruel and bloody utopian religion. The small mining town from which I adopted my two Russian-born sons was once, I’m told, a burial ground for Joseph Stalin’s political prisoners. Russians are, and should be, glad to see it gone.
But Russia won’t survive a post-Communist era in which whirl is king. Even if Russia stabilizes and excels in the global market, that’s not enough. Unbridled capitalist prosperity doesn’t make love, babies, or societies. Nor will Mr. Putin be able to stem the tide of population loss with government incentives to have more babies, or with ambitious national childcare strategies.
Instead Russians need what all humans need: a vision that transcends Marxist ideology and Western prosperity. They need a gospel that shows them that a man’s life “does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:15 ESV), nor does it consist in the power of the state.
