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MOSCOW, RUSSIA, April 25, 2002: Russia is facing a demographic crisis so dire that its population could shrink by half within 50 years. The obvious solution, to encourage young immigrants from overpopulated Asian neighbors such as China or India, is so politically sensitive that Russian leaders refuse to even discuss it, reported The Christian Science Monitor recently. Russia faces a double whammy, it said. Like most of the developed world, birthrates have fallen far below levels that would sustain the population. Births now stand at 1.1 per woman, far short of the 2.4 needed to stabilize the population. At the same time, the death rates, particularly among working-age males, have shot up due to post-Soviet poverty, substance abuse, disease, stress and other ills. The population has fallen from 149 million a decade ago to just over 144 million now and experts say it is losing a million each year. Mr Lev Gudkov, a demographer with the independent Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, predicted that there could be one pensioner for every worker in Russia within 20 years. The Russian nationalists have been blaming the crisis on women, and their solution amounts to removing them from the labor market and sending them home to have more children. Unlike most Western countries, which make up for lower birthrates through immigration that provides workers to keep economies growing and tax revenues flush, Russia is not to open to the idea. Said Mr. Yevgeny Krasinyev, head of migration studies at the official Institute of Social and Economic Population Studies in Moscow: ”The only acceptable sources of immigrants for us are the Russian-speaking populations of former Soviet countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).” But the flow from the CIS is slowing to a trickle.

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