Russia Destroys Its Children
Filed under: Russia
Of all the criticisms that can be made of Vladimir Putin's Russia, by far the most damning is its failure to carry out the basic biological function of population replacement.
Far more Russians pass from the earth each year than are born (for this reason, Russia has a horrifying net loss of population each year, in the hundreds of thousands, even though it has a huge amount of immigration as unwelcome Russians return home from far-flung parts of the former USSR). Only 21 countries in the whole world have a higher mortality rate than Russia, and its rate of 16/1,000 is double that of the United States. The mortality rate has risen steadily through Putin's years in power (it is up nearly 15% since 2003), and the only thing Putin has been able to think of to deal with that reality is to bribe Russian parents to have more children. This classic Russian "solution" is actually worse than the existing problem. People don't want children, but they do want money. So they take the money, have the child -- and then what happens? That child will be lucky to live to see his 18th birthday, and if he does he'll certainly be impacted by the fact that the only reason he exists is because his parents got paid. Meanwhile, nothing is done about Russia's alarming mortality rate, which sees the average Russian man fail to reach his sixtieth year of life. From AIDS to smoking to house fires, Russia's population is being wiped out by every scourge and disease imaginable, while the Kremlin ignores the problem and spends its cash buzzing America and Britain with strategic bombers and sending weaponry to the likes of Venezuela, Syria and Iran.
Here are just a few of the horrifying details:
- 2 out of every 5 Russian children are victims of family violence
- 50,000 Russian children flee their homes each year
- 11,000 Russian children are currently imprisoned
- last year alone, 2,000 Russian children were murdered by their parents
- 4.5 million Russian children live in single-parent homes without child support
- One Russian woman is murdered by her husband every 40 minutes
- Russia and Belarus lead the world in divorces
- One Russian commits suicide every ten minutes
- Russia has the fifth-highest murder rate on the planet
Russia's divorce rate is one-third greater than the U.S. Its suicide rate is four times higher than that of the America's, and its child and spousal murder rates are ten times higher.
In a recent op-ed column in the Moscow Times, the brilliant Russian commentator Georgy Bovt, who hosts a program on Moscow's City-FM radio station, told the paper's readers more about this ongoing atrocity against Russia's children.
Bovt noticed that while incidents of violence against Russian children by American adoptive parents, which are the rare exception to the general rule, get massive airtime on anti-American, state-owned Russian television whenever they occur, the Kremlin totally ignores the outrageous conduct of Russians themselves. And this doesn't apply only to state-controlled media. When has "president" Putin ever given a speech demanding that Russians take better care of their children?
Bovt writes:
If we are so concerned about the fate of Russian children adopted by foreigners, why do we remain silent about the children adopted by Russians? There are no statistics available on domestic abuse cases of adopted children. We know only that 2,500 Russian children die at their parents' hands every year, according to Interior Ministry statistics. We don't know how many of those children were adopted because the country has no system for monitoring the progress of adopted children. But we do know that 1 million adoptive parents were deprived of their adoption rights because of child abuse. Another 2,500 families changed their minds and sent the children they had adopted back to the orphanages.
The answer to the question he asks, of course, is simple: Russian's aren't "so concerned." In fact, they're not concerned at all. What motivates them is not love for their children, but hatred for America. Bovt writes:
Russian laws governing adoptions by foreigners have gotten stricter in recent years. Even accredited adoption agencies are finding it difficult to manage -- primarily because of the pervasive corruption among bureaucrats. Only in the last two years has the number of Russians adopting children -- 7,000 -- exceeded that of foreigners adopting Russian children -- 6,000.
So foreigners care more about Russia's children, and adopt more of them, than Russians themselves. And now, by imposing restrictions on that process, Russia is actually choking off that care, condemning its parentless children to lives of brutal isolation. In Russians' view these children are garbage, but still too good to give to filth-ridden Americans.
That's barbarism, pure and simple. Only such an attitude could explain why Russia loses up to one million people from its population every year as all manner of disease and pestilence ravage the nation. The average Russian man doesn't live to see his sixtieth year, placing Russia outside the world's top 100 nations in that category. Russia is, indeed, barbaric as a matter of statistics.
And it doesn't care. As Bovt points out, it doesn't even try to keep -- much less publish -- basic records regarding its performance, and even if it was doing so such data could not be taken seriously. Russians have chosen to be ruled by a proud KGB spy whose words are no more trustworthy than astrology. Bovt's column itself is victimized by a failure to fully recognize this lack of reliability: When he states "we do know that 1 million adoptive parents were deprived of their adoption rights because of child abuse" he forgets to insert they key phrase "at least" to signal that this Russian data cannot be considered reliable and could well be a gross understatement -- owing not merely to Kremlin dishonesty but also to Russia's general tradition of bureaucratic corruption and incompetence.
Russia scholar Paul Goble has more details about the horror of Russian atrocities against children and the pathetic efforts of the government to protect them. His post is the source for the first five of the bullet points above.
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