Between them, Russia and China account for 17% of the world????????s territory (roughly 26 million square miles out of about 150 million total) and nearly 25% of its population (almost 1.5 billion people out of over 6 billion total). Yet, the two countries only account for 7% of the world????????s nominal economy ($3 trillion out of $44.5 trillion). True, they account for 17% of the world????????s economy adjusted for ???????purchasing power parity??????? ($10.5 trillion out of $60.7 trillion), but even here their share of wealth lags far behind their share of the population, and the idea of ???????purchasing power parity??????? is a fiction, because it takes no account of the quality of services delivered. It presumes, for instance, that a visit to the doctor is the same in the United States as in Russia or China, and since the visit is cheaper in the latter two countries it artificially inflates their income level. If you want to see how silly this notion is, just ask any sick person where he????????d prefer to be treated. Or take a look at the photograph at the top of this column, which illustrates an ordinary Russian hospital room.

However, if you were to quantify the share of anti-Americanism claimed by these two countries from the world share, they????????d definitely be world leaders. America????????s nominal GDP, closing in on $13 trillion, exceeds that of China and Russia combined by nearly 25%, so one could speculate that simple economic jealousy and rivalry is a considerable factor in explaining their attitude. But the two sides also espouse vastly different values systems (China and Russia are both also world leaders in the anti-democracy category), and their anti-Americanism is dramatically illustrated in the conflicts over rogue regimes Iran and North Korea, where Russia and China have teamed up in an effort to doggedly frustrate U.S. policy initiatives. So it????????s clear that China and Russia are prepared to carry the confrontation beyond the economic playing field.

Russia is clearly the junior partner in any relationship with China, and using China as a cloak to increase its apparent significance is obviously part of the Russo-Chinese axis. Since January 1, 2005, Russia has 2.8 million births and 4 million deaths. In other words, it has experienced a net population loss of 1.2 million people in less than two years. China, by contrast, is a net gainer in this category by an amazing 15 million. At those rates, over the course of the next ten years, China will add to its population by an amount greater than Russia????????s current population, while Russia????????s population will fall by more than half before this century is out. Indeed, Russia????????s looming demographic crisis is its most salient factor in determining whether it will remain any kind of factor on the world stage over the long term. A series of recent stories in the Los Angeles Times and the Economist have reemphasized the stark nature of the crisis scenario Russia faces.

The Economist notes: ???????At less than 59, male life expectancy has collapsed in a way otherwise found only in sub-Saharan Africa. It is around five years lower than it was 40 years ago, and 13 years lower than that of Russian women????????one of the biggest gaps in the world.??????? The explanation? The Economist states: ???????Russia leads the world in a staggering range of scourges and vices. Nicholas Eberstadt, of the American Enterprise Institute, speculates that the heart-disease rate may be the highest anywhere, ever. Russians’ propensity to die violently is probably unprecedented in industrialised societies at peace. The suicide rate is more than five times Britain’s. With fewer cars, Russians are four times more likely to die in traffic accidents than Britons. Murder is 20 times more common than in western Europe.??????? At the root of these vices, according to the Economist, is an age-old Russian problem: ???????There is an obvious culprit: booze, especially the Russian taste for strong spirits, sometimes not fit for human consumption and often moonshine. Heart disease and violence, the two biggest factors in the mortality surge, are strongly alcohol-related. Alcohol poisoning itself killed 36,000 Russians last year; in America, it kills a few hundred. Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts in the late 1980s to rein in alcohol consumption briefly improved life expectancy.???????

The other side of the coin is the utter failure of Russian social policy. As the Economist observes: ???????Russia’s national sickness is now likely to worsen, because of AIDS. Since the disease arrived so late, the Russians ought to have been ready. Instead, out of prudishness, intolerance and Soviet-style pig-headedness, the response was criminally lackadaisical. This year the federal AIDS budget is around 3.3 billion roubles ($124m) with extra funding coming from abroad: it was a big increase, but it is piffling by international standards.??????? According to the LA Times, ???????Murray Feshbach of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, one of the world’s leading experts on Russian health and demographics, said in a study that 80% of Russian AIDS patients are younger than 30. In the West, it’s nearly the reverse: 70% are older than 30.??????? And AIDS is far from an isolated failure. The LA Times also notes: ???????Abortions outpaced births last year by more than 100,000. An estimated 10 million Russians of reproductive age are sterile because of botched abortions or poor health. The public healthcare system is collapsing. And many parents in more prosperous urban areas say they can’t afford homes large enough for the number of children they’d like to have.??????? The healthcare system is in chaos, yet the Kremlin finds funds to develop its ballsistic missile program and maintain universal military conscription, a shocking paradox. The LA Times reports: ???????The Scientific Center of Children’s Health, a branch of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, estimates that 45% of Russian children are born with “health deviations,” including problems of the central nervous system, faulty hearts, malformed urinary tracts and low birth weight.??????? These policy failures should not be at all surprising. The Kremlin has systemmatically cut itself off from criticism and hence from the flow of information, just as in Soviet times. The same ham-handed policy gaffs are emminently foreseeable.

The LA Times reveals that ???????Russia’s suicide rate, at about 36 per 100,000 people, is second only to that of Lithuania, according to the Serbsky National Research Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry. In some remote areas of Russia, the rate exceeds 100 per 100,000.??????? It tells the story of Roman Kiptenko, 35, who is lucky enough to live in Moscow where the nation????????s wealth is concentrated and yet lives a bleak and hopeless existence:

He has a family, his health and two university degrees, but his life is turning out far differently than he had imagined. The national parks institute where he worked disintegrated in the Soviet collapse. He now works as a technical director in a friend’s advertising company in Moscow. But the firm is small and its future uncertain. His wife was laid off last spring from her job as a dental office manager. Kiptenko has begun to realize that they might never do better than the $330-a-month apartment ???????? a cramped living room adjoining a tiny kitchen ???????? where they live with their 10-year-old daughter. Kiptenko and his wife sleep on a pullout sofa. Their daughter’s bed in the corner seats guests by day, her toys stacked neatly to one side. Clothing is stacked in cupboards next to Kiptenko’s computer. “At first, situations would come up when my wife would talk about wanting another child,” he said. “But gradually, she stopped raising those questions.”

Another massive problem is pandemic pollution. The LA Times describes a horror story: ???????Nowhere is the healthcare crisis more pronounced than in Karabash and other poisoned cities of the Soviet-era industrial belt. A legacy of chemical and heavy metal emissions and radiation leaks, including one worse that Chernobyl, earned the Karabash region a reputation in the 1990s as the most polluted spot on Earth. The looming smokestack of Karabash’s blister-copper smelter has been venting as much as 180 tons of sulfur dioxide and metal particulates into the air annually since 1910, before the Bolsheviks came to power.??????? But in Russia, non-governmental organizations like Greenpeace are under virulent assault from the Kremlin as havens of spies bent on undermining Russian national security, so popular resistance to these catastrophes is virtually non-existence and totally disorganized.

The results are terrifying, even if you are merely a tourist in Russia. The LA Times reports:

The 8.8 million people who ride the Moscow subway system every day are exposed to nearly 1 1/2 times the maximum safe level of carbon monoxide and other dangerous gases, the government reported. An outbreak of hepatitis A traced to bad beer hospitalized 600 people in the Tver region last summer, and about 500 others were sickened with the same illness in November in Russia’s third-largest city, Nizhny Novgorod. Cases of hepatitis A and typhoid fever climbed 20% in the first half of 2004, the Health Ministry reported. But neither disease is as worrisome to health officials outside Russia as the alarming growth of AIDS and tuberculosis, a common infection associated with AIDS. Russia and its neighboring former Soviet republics are experiencing the fastest-growing epidemics of AIDS and TB in Europe. Russia is seeing at least 120,000 new tuberculosis cases a year, 10 times the number in the United States, which has double the population. Last year, about 32,000 Russians died of the disease.

Some try to blame this situation on the end of totalitarianism in Russia and the inevitable chaos that striving for democracy produced, but they are merely apologists for dictatorship. The real cause is clear, as the LA Times emphasizes:

“Seventy-five years of Bolshevik life in this country led to the formation of a tribe of people which was cultivated to listen to orders, and fulfill them,” said Alexander Gorelik, a St. Petersburg physician. Stalinism, he said, aimed for “the planned and gradual physical destruction of the most moral, the most creative group of the population. There is such a thing as a will for life. And the whole trouble is that the Russian public in general, and especially the male population, has a big deficiency in this area.” Vyacheslav Pushkarev, a Russian Orthodox priest who oversees several congregations in Siberian villages now too small to have a full-time cleric, said the Soviet system destroyed bodies and spirits in equal proportion. “We are left with this infection in us, this sickness of degradation in everything around us because we were all part of it,” he said. “We’re living in a huge bowl here, and we’re all getting boiled together.”

Indeed, Russia????????s inability to make progress over the centuries is quite stark. Despite the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution, as the LA Times states: ???????Moscow has the second-largest concentration of billionaires in the world. But one-fifth of all Russians live on less than $38 a month, many of them in the countryside.??????? In other words, Russians have heedlessly returned to the pre-Bolshevik bipolar economic economically, while continuing on the same authoritarian track they followed when their monarchy was destroyed.

Russia and China are not natural allies, but rather natural rivals. As China????????s population dramatically expands while Russia????????s dramatically decreases, it????????s inevitable that the two will come to blows over China????????s desire for territorial expansion into Siberia. This will have nothing to do with imperialism on China????????s part, but rather simply with a need for space, but if history is any indication Russia will be stubbornly unwilling to accommodate China (just as it has steadfastly refused to allow Japan territorial acquisition in its Pacific islands and preferred bloody, catastrophic war with Chechnya rather than allowing independence). This attitude, even more than Russia????????s disastrous demographics, could be Russia????????s ultimate Waterloo. As the Economist article stated: ???????In Irkutsk the big fear is the ???????yellow peril.???????? As people quit cities that should never have existed, the population of Siberia and the Russian far east has shrunk faster than the rest of the country’s. Those who remain fret about Chinese hordes swarming across the border, intent on annexation. ???????They work for kopeks and live ten to a room,???????? complains Alexander Turik, an Irkutsk extremist, also alleging that Chinese men are paid to marry Russian women. Even some Chinese worry: Changa, a long-term trader in the Irkutsk market known as Shanghai, grumbles that recent arrivals are damaging business.???????

Given Russia????????s position as described above, it begins to seem like fundamental irrationality to display anti-Americanism and provoke the U.S into a second cold-war confrontation, and indeed it is difficult to understand a free choice by Russian voters to bestow power on a proud KGB spy like Vladimir Putin so soon after the USSR came to ruin in any other way. Yet, this is the reality we seem to be faced with, and we are charged with an important task in seeking to understand and respond to it as democracy faces many challenges as a result, not the least of which is the enabling of rogue regimes including Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and North Korea.

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.