Thursday, August 1, 2019

Russia at the brink

Police officers detain an opposition politician Lyubov Sobol, one of the candidates barred from elections to Moscow City Duma
   Sobol said the Kremlin faced a political crisis.  "It won't be solved until they understand that people are demanding political representation that takes account of their own opinion and will, that these people are not going away, and that the country and Moscow have changed. It's not possible to ignore people anymore," Sobol, 31, told Reuters.

"The main thing now is to have mass regular but peaceful protests ... and not to give up.” https://wsau.com/news/articles/2019/jul/31/kremlin-critic-to-putin-allow-free-election-or-face-weekly-protests/923363/?refer-section=world
https://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFKCN1UQ2BH
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  Last month activists of Dront, a group of local environmentalists, prepared a report about the reasons for Nizhny Novgorod's shrinking population . It was the first serious study of the problem and showed an alarming increase in the number of diagnosed cancers – just in the first half of the year, 3,579 people died of cancer and 14,102 from heart diseases.  It is profoundly depressing for a city in the heart of Russia, a cultural ­centre, with 793 years of history, traditionally good universities, beautiful architecture, a newly built subway system, highways and great museums.
  Why is Nizhny dying?  Ecologists urged the governor, Valery Shantsev, to spend more than just 0.5% of the region's budget on improving the environment. They say public health suffered directly from toxic pollution that has badly affected the city's drinking water.  One of the city's biggest neighbours is Dzerzhinsk, a large industrial center for the production of chemicals. "But so far, we have not heard of any plans for improvement," says Kayumov. "Unfortunately, governor Shantsev sees us as his enemies, who are trying to diminish Nizhny Novgorod's attractiveness for investors."
Russia's population started to fall in the early 1990s, when the ruble devalued and millions of people lost their sense of security, along with most of their savings.  Families stopped breeding. The entire idea of giving birth and raising a child amidst the economic chaos of the post-Communist years of the 1990s sounded terrifying to young families. But for the first time in decades the population began to increase last year, albeit very slightly, and the trend has continued in the first 6 months of 2014, when women living across Russia, including the territory of annexed Crimea, gave birth to 1.2 million babies – 15,000 more than the number of deaths.  But according to ­demographers this is a blip before the country enters another, even deeper "demographic pothole", experts say. "Russia has not managed to beat the depopulation crises.  What we see now is a temporary tendency, a result of the baby boom of 1980s," Igor Beloborodov, one of Russia's leading demographers, explains.
"Many fewer girls were born in the 1990s and unlike the previous generation, women reaching maternity age have a much weaker motivation to become mothers – by 2020, Russia will face another wave of disappearing population," he warns.
Population experts explain that cities like Nizhny are dying so fast because of a low fertility rate.  In 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, fewer than one baby was born per woman, meaning there are few young adults around today to have children....
It is profoundly depressing for a city in the heart of Russia, a cultural ­centre with 793 years of history, traditionally good universities, beautiful architecture, a newly built subway system, highways and great museums.  Why is Nizhny dying?  Ecologists urged the governor, Valery Shantsev, to spend more than just 0.5% of the region's budget on improving the environment. They say public health suffered directly from toxic pollution that has badly affected the city's drinking water. One of the city's biggest neighbours is Dzerzhinsk, a large industrial center for the production of chemicals.  "But so far, we have not heard of any plans for improvement," says Kayumov.  "Unfortunately, governor Shantsev sees us as his enemies who are trying to diminish Nizhny Novgorod's attractiveness for investors."
Russia's population started to fall in the early 1990s when the ruble devalued and millions of people lost their sense of security, along with most of their savings.  Families stopped breeding. The entire idea of giving birth and raising a child amidst the economic chaos of the post-Communist years of the 1990s sounded terrifying to young families. But for the first time in decades the population began to increase last year, albeit very slightly, and the trend has continued in the first 6 months of 2014, when women living across Russia, including the territory of annexed Crimea, gave birth to 1.2 million babies – 15,000 more than the number of deaths.  But according to ­demographers this is a blip before the country enters another, even deeper "demographic pothole", experts say. "Russia has not managed to beat the depopulation crises. What we see now is a temporary tendency, a result of the baby boom of 1980s," Igor Beloborodov, one of Russia's leading demographers, explains.
"Many fewer girls were born in the 1990s and unlike the previous generation, women reaching maternity age have a much weaker motivation to become mothers – by 2020 Russia will face another wave of disappearing population," he warns.
Population experts explain that cities like Nizhny are dying so fast because of a low fertility rate.  In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, fewer than one baby was born per woman, meaning there are few young adults around today to have children.  https://www.newsweek.com/2014/10/24/death-and-recession-worlds-fifth-fastest-shrinking-city-277382.html
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3-27-2019     Rosstat only counts Russians who officially cancel their registration in their homeland — something that most emigrants do not do.  As a result, the number of Russians emigrating from the country is much higher than the numbers Russia has officially reported, according to a study that the independent media outlet Proekt released in January, citing OECD data.  Indeed certain destination countries, including the United States, have reported Russian immigration figures as many as six times as high as those reported by Rosstat.    https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/russia-takes-its-demographic-decline

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