Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has had a mixed week.  He was notably pleased with the latest population figures, long a major concern, but he will have been far less pleased by the activities of the US’s new ambassador to Moscow.

In a briefing in our 5 October issue we argued that “Russia’s strategic position is weak and getting weaker”.  Among the many reasons for this has been the country’s declining population.  It is a significant relief to the Kremlin, therefore, that 2011 brought the best demographic news for nearly two decades.

Between the 2002 census and the 2010 census, Russia’s population declined from 145.2m to 142.8m.  Due to a high death rate (15 per thousand compared with the US’s eight per thousand), a low birth rate (10 births per thousand against the US’s 14 per thousand and a global average of 20 per thousand), a high abortion rate (13 per every 10 live births), Russia’s population has been declining by 700,000-800,000 a year.  Due to the ageing factor, the workforce has been declining at an even steeper 1m per year.  Until the latest figures, it has been predicted that the Russian population would be just 111m by 2050.

The consequences of this decline have become a constant fear to Russian policymakers.  Lev Gudkov, a demographer with the Russian Centre for Public Opinion Research, has warned apocalyptically: “Whole regions of Siberia and the Russian Far East are already depopulated, and new deserts are appearing in the former ‘black earth’ regions of central Russia.  We will not be able to maintain our industry, agriculture, or our armed forces.” 

The latter point, about the armed forces, was reinforced by the 2011 autumn call-up for the army which was the lowest ever, thought to have netted just 135,000 instead of 300,000 recruits.

Putin, we know, has become obsessed by the problem, and so it was not a surprise to see him revealing the better news personally at a sitting of the federal government.  Speaking on 20 January, he said: “In 2011 births came to 1,793,900 and mortality fell by 5.6%.  These are the best figures for Russia for 19 years.“  He said that the rate of population decline had slowed by 80%, with average life expectancy increasing by 1.5 years to 70.3, and he added: “Including migration, Russia’s population grew by 160,000 to over 143m.”  According to Putin, the population question remains “an acute issue”, but ministers’ efforts to correct the trend “are not going to waste”.

Meanwhile, on the domestic political front, the Kremlin is continuing with its slightly modified approach to open political debate in the run-up to the 4 March presidential election.  A close analysis of media activity shows that opponents of Putin’s return as president, such as former chess champion Garry Kasparov, former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, and academic-politician Vladimir Ryzhkov, are being given more airtime by the main state-controlled television channels, but their comments are still being heavily edited and they have been targeted by smear campaigns.

An example of the editing was the Channel One programme on 22 January which featured former Putin economics aide Andrey Illarionov saying rather blandly that “institutions of a free political system” are best for economic advancement.  But, according to Illarionov himself, he had actually talked for half-an-hour about how Putin was “totally destroying democracy” and that he must resign.

An example of attempts to smear opponents was the 22 January NTV programme which showed opposition politicians and activists, including Nemtsov and the popular anti-corruption campaigner Aleksey Navalnyy, enjoying luxury foreign holidays.  Also, while Kasparov, Nemtsov, and Ryzhkov are being given airtime, the more-dangerous Navalnyy continues to be excluded. 

The shallowness of the Kremlin’s conversion to open debate has been furthers emphasized by the row with the new United States ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul.  McFaul has barely been in Moscow for a week and yet he has caused a storm by meeting with opposition activists.  The activists include Nemtsov, the environmentalist Yevgenia Chirikova, and Lilia Shibanova, the head of the Golos election-monitoring body that revealed massive fraud in the December parliamentary elections won by Putin’s United Russia.

In a reference to his 2001 book Russia’s Unfinished Revolution, after the meeting at the embassy with the opposition activists, Channel One accused McFaul of coming to Russia “to finish the revolution”.  As an academic who has campaigned hard for democracy-building, McFaul’s appointment at this time is notably provocative.  As long ago as 2007, he wrote: “Pretending that Putin is our ‘best bet’ is exactly what Putin’s team seeks and what the West must reject.”

We have written a lot in recent months about the paranoia gripping the Kremlin, much of which is brought on by seemingly inevitable strategic decline (in which, to go back to where this briefing began, demography has played its part).  McFaul’s arrival in Moscow at such a sensitive time, however, brings to mind Golda Meir’s alleged 1973 comment to Henry Kissinger: “Even the paranoid have enemies.”