The Russian Population: Plainly in the Red

I know that Japan has a problem with depopulation, but Russia's got a bigger problem, especially when there are 1.2 abortions for every 1 live birth.

Wow.

The article is with the Public Interest, (Russia: The Sick Man of Europe) and contains some shockers:

The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, offers the relatively optimistic projection of a "mere" 14 million person drop in Russia's population between 2000 and 2025—an average net decline of about 560,000 persons a year. The U.N. Population Division's (UNPD) "medium variant" projection, by contrast, suggests a drop of more than 21 million over that same quarter century—about 840,000 persons a year for the period as a whole.
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But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian fertility rate likewise collapsed, plummeting from 2.19 births per woman in 1986-87 to 1.17 in 1999.

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According to some recent reports, however, 13 percent of Russia's married couples of childbearing age are infertile—nearly twice the 7 percent for the United States in 1995 as reported by the National Center for Health Statistics.
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A Russian woman nowadays can expect to have more abortions than births over the course of her childbearing years. In 1988, at the end of the Soviet era, Russian women underwent an officially tabulated 4.6 million abortions—two for every live birth. In 2002, the country officially reported 1.7 million abortions—over 120 for every 100 live births.
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Throughout the EU, for example, the median age at marriage for women is the late 20s, while it is still about 22 in Russia; Russia's median female age at first birth, correspondingly, is distinctly lower than in most EU countries (23 vs. 27 to 29). A shift toward these EU patterns of marriage and maternity would have the immediate effect of postponing births, and thus probably lowering annual fertility further.
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But it's not just the fertility rates.....

Russia's violent death rate for men under 65 is nearly six times as high as Belgium's, over nine times as high as Israel's, and over a dozen times that of the United Kingdom. As is well known, men are more likely than women to die violent deaths—but in a gruesome crossover, these death rates for Russian women are now higher than for most western European men.
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In 1994, for example, the estimate of pure alcohol consumed by the population aged 15 and older amounted to 18.5 liters per capita annually—the equivalent of 125 cc. of vodka for everyone, every day.

As it happens, in recent decades variations in alcohol consumption seem to track fairly closely with changes in Russian mortality (and especially with male mortality)—the former being a leading indicator for the latter. Heavy drinking is directly associated with Russia's appallingly high risk of deadly injury—and Russia's binge drinking habits also seems to be closely associated with death through cardiac failure.
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I doubt this will go on indefinitely. If it does, the power that Russia is keen on asserting beyond its border will diminish. How will it control Chechnya? Or other satellite states?

One idea that's been booted around is that Russia might retrench by selling off Siberia to China for massive sum to get out of debt and concentrate on the western provinces. With a massive depopulation, the state might not be practically able to administer large swathes of the nation effectively. Then again, how does Canada administer the far north? Easily, no one wants to take it anyway. It's probably just a pipe dream since Russia is swimming in oil money right now. I guess we'll have to see how it all plays out.