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http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis...likely-in-2012/

Russia’s dramatic demographic improvements have continued through the first seven months of 2012, though very few people seem to have noticed them. You still regularly see articles like this one from NPR that talk about Russia’s “troubling demographics” but that don’t actually provide any indication as to whether these demographics have gotten better or worse over the past decade.

Well Rosstat released a new batch a data a few days ago and I thought it would be worth taking a quick look not at the month-over-month changes, but at how Russia’s projected 2012 results compare to its past experience:

The improvement in the natural population change in particularly impressive. Russia went from experiencing one of the world’s most dire depopulations to being naturally stagnant in barely seven years. Indeed Russia’s population is now more naturally stable than those of many of its neighbors, including several countries that have joined the EU and NATO (as I noted a few months ago, Russia’s population is now more naturally stable than Germany’s).

Does the rapid and sustained improvement in Russia’s demographic trends exonerate the Putin regime from its many sins?  No. But I think, at a minimum, the fact that Russians are, on average, living longer, having more children, drinking themselves to death less frequently, killing themselves less frequently, and killing each other less frequently* ought to complicate the media narrative of the country that is overwhelmingly about chaos, rottenness, decay, and decline.

The handful of Western demographers who, in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s, accurately predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union did so not simply because Soviet Union’s level of mortality was bad (though it was obviously not very good) but because the trends were all going in the wrong direction. Infant mortality, and mortality from infectious diseases, had always been higher in Russia than in the West, but they had usually been decreasing and, very gradually, converging towards the levels of developed Western countries.

But in the 1970′s and most of the 1980′s the Soviet Union was diverging from the West. Mortality wasn’t going down, or even going down more slowly than before, it was actually increasing. To a large extent this reflected the shocking growth in alcoholism and binge drinking, and to a lesser extent it reflected a genuine society-wide sense of malaise and hopelessness and a breakdown in the basic functionality of the public health system. Although a narrative in which the dread Vladimir Putin has cruelly driven the Russians to despair is plausible, at a very basic level it simply doesn’t match the evidence. In 2012 Russia is arguably safer and healthier than it has ever been before, and if Russians are actually in some sort of mass existential crisis about the future of their country they have an odd way of showing it.

Totally independent of your political orientation, whether you loathe or love Vladimir Putin and the system he has molded, we can all be thankful that Russia’s demographics have improved as dramatically as they have over the past decade. At the end of the day those demographic indicators are about the lives of real people, and it’s comforting to know that they’re (mostly) moving in the right direction.

*Alcohol poisonings, suicide, and murder have all declined noticeably over the past several years, and the decrease in deaths from “external causes” is  proportionally much larger than the decrease in deaths from heart disease, cancer, etc.