MOSCOW — From morning all through the night, tens of thousands of Russians have been lining up since Saturday in the cold with just one aim: to kiss a glass-covered reliquary that they believe holds the Virgin Mary’s belt.

They shuffle along, waiting for up to 12 hours without complaint in a line that stretches for miles. Within a few days, the organizers say, the wait could reach 24 hours. At any given time there are about 25,000 people, according to news media estimates, and as of Wednesday morning, 285,000 true believers had earned their moment before the belt, said the St. Andrew the First-Called Foundation, which organized the tour.

As befits his status as the arbiter of most things Russian, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin was the first to greet the holy relic when it arrived on Oct. 20 in St. Petersburg from a Greek Orthodox monastery on Mount Athos in Greece for a monthlong tour of Russia.

Of all the industrial nations, perhaps only Russia outdistances the United States in the religiosity of its people, two million of whom venerated the belt before its final stop in Moscow. ...

Moscow’s mayor, Sergei S. Sobyanin, came to inspect the scene. The benefactor of the St. Andrew the First-Called Foundation is Vladimir Yakunin, president of the Russian Railroads, who is close to Mr. Putin. At a news conference in October, Mr. Yakunin said the belt — usually kept at the Vatopedi Monastery on the Mount Athos peninsula in northern Greece, where women are not permitted — was known for promoting fertility.

“The belt of the Most Holy Virgin Mary possesses miraculous power,“ he said. “It helps women and helps in childbirth. In our demographic situation, this is in and of itself important."

Labels: children, demographics, Orthodox Christianity, religion, Russia

VOTE

Labels: childhood, children, motherhood, parenting, Russia

VOTE

President Dmitri A. Medvedev has signed into law the first steps intended to restrict abortion since the collapse of communism, the latest salvo in what is beginning to resemble the fierce divide over abortion in the United States.

The changes require abortion providers to devote 10 percent of any advertising to describing the dangers of abortion to a woman’s health, and they make it illegal to describe abortion as a safe medical procedure.

Tighter restrictions on abortion may follow after Parliament considers a separate health bill in the autumn. ...

Mr. Medvedev has made the fight against Russia’s falling birthrate and plunging population, now at just under 143 million, a feature of his presidency, offering incentives like payouts for a third child and land plots to encourage women to give birth.

Official statistics placed the number of abortions at 1.3 million in 2009, a significant drop from the 1990s. Russia’s increasingly vocal anti-abortion activists, some in Parliament, say it is perhaps many times higher, and Mr. Medvedev’s wife, Svetlana Medvedeva, has taken up the cause. ...

The campaign was tied into the “Day of Family, Love and Faithfulness,” a holiday created by Mrs. Medvedeva and the Russian Orthodox Church and centered around Pyotr and Fevronia, a couple who ruled the Murom region northeast of Moscow in the late 12th century and were later declared saints. The president and his wife went to Murom to extol family values and encourage childbirth.

Meanwhile, Valery Draganov, a member of Parliament from United Russia, the pro-Kremlin party, reintroduced a legislative package for consideration in the lower house that would place strict limits on abortion.

Labels: abortion, demographics, natalism, Orthodox Christianity, Russia

VOTE

Is there any nation as contrary in its demographics as Russia? While the world’s population police obsess about the ongoing “explosion” of the human species, Russia is on a depopulation slide and in danger of imploding. Again, while the world’s conscience is stirred by Asia’s 163 million missing females, Russia has a gender deficit of 10 million men. And, while “family planning” nearly everywhere else means preventing births at all costs, in Russia it now means reminding people to have a child or three.

The awful truth behind these Russian trends is confirmed by provisional figures from the country’s 2010 census. The population has declined from 145 million in 2002 to just under 143 million — less than half the population of its rival superpower, the United States (322 million), and far behind the rising powers of China and India to the east and south. If it were not for growth in immigration from former Soviet republics, the figure would be even worse.

Basically, there are more Russian deaths than births. For a developed country, life expectancy is shockingly low, with an average of 66 years — 73 for women and around 60 for men, compared with 77 in the US and 80 in Japan. There is a lot that could be said about Russia’s “man problem” but it seems to be both a cause and an effect of the decay of the family that started in the Soviet era. Russia’s 700,000 orphans bear witness to that, along with high rates of divorce that have given way during the last two decades to low marriage rates and increasing levels of cohabitation. The latter trends, together with political and economic uncertainty, have further discouraged childbearing.

The net result is that Russians are not reproducing themselves. The total fertility rate has been below 1.2 children per woman but has risen to 1.4 — not far behind Europe’s, but still far short of “replacement”. Of the children that are conceived, a shocking number are aborted: official figures for 2008 put the number of births at 1.7 million and abortions at 1.2 million, but some say the true figure for abortions may be as high as 4 million a year. Some 10 to 15 per cent of abortions have complications, leaving at least 7 to 8 per cent of women sterile, which, ironically, has opened the way for surrogacy entrepreneurs.

Labels: abortion, children, cohabitation, demographics, family size, Marriage, Orthodox Christianity, population control, religion, Russia

VOTE

GROZNY, Russia (Reuters) - Adam, 52, keeps his three wives in different towns to stop them squabbling, but the white-bearded Chechen adds he might soon take a fourth.

"Chechnya is Muslim, so this is our right as men. They (the wives) spend time together, but do not always see eye to eye," said the soft-spoken pensioner, who only gave his first name.

Hardline Kremlin-backed leader Ramzan Kadyrov is vying with insurgents for authority in a land ravaged by two secessionist wars with Moscow. Each side is claiming Islam as its flag of legitimacy, each reviles the other as criminal and blasphemous.

Wary of the dangers of separatism in a vast country, Moscow watches uneasily as central power yields to Islamic tenets. It must chose what it might see as the lesser of two evils.

Though polygamy is illegal in Russia, the southern Muslim region of Chechnya encourages the practice, arguing it is allowed by sharia law and the Koran, Islam's holiest book.

By Russian law, Adam is only married to his first wife of 28 years, Zoya, the plump, blue-eyed mother of his three children, with whom he shares a home on the outskirts of the regional capital Grozny.

His "marriages" to the other two -- squirreled away in villages nearby -- were carried out in elaborate celebrations and are recognized by Chechen authorities.

Labels: Islam, polygamy, religion, Russia, Sufism

VOTE

Ever since the days of the British political economist Thomas Robert Malthus [1766-1834], demographic commentators have been faulted for excessive despondency, for being overly ready to find ubiquitous "population problems" in virtually every new demographic development. Be that as it may, serious or even disastrous population problems can still threaten real existing countries--even today. In fact, we are currently witnessing a demographic crisis of historic proportions right before our very eyes.

The crisis, however, is not ravaging an illiterate and impoverished Third World country. Instead, it is unfolding in a modern, highly-educated nation that sent the first cosmonaut into space: the Russian Federation. Russia is in the grip of startling and anomalous demographic tendencies, trends whose humanitarian and economic consequences are not only self-evidently adverse, but, quite arguably, dire.

Russia today is a society at peace. But judging by vital statistics alone, it looks like a country trapped in a prolonged and devastating war. Since the end of the Communist era, in late 1991, the country's birth rates have collapsed while its death rates have soared. Over the post-Communist era as a whole, Russia has reported three deaths for every two births. The year 2008 was a "good" one for modern Russia: it registered "only" five deaths for every four births.

Since the beginning of 1992, Russia has recorded nearly 13 million more deaths than births, and the country's population has dropped by about 7 million; only a net influx of migrants prevented an even steeper drop. The magnitude of Russia's ongoing population decline (to date) is overshadowed in our post-war epoch only by China's terrible population decline in the immediate wake of Mao's disastrous "Great Leap Forward." China's population decline abated, however, as soon as Beijing's fanatical policies were reversed. Russia's depopulation, on the other hand, shows no signs of a genuine turnaround.

One major component of the "demographic shock" that Russia has been experiencing was a sudden, radical reduction in fertility. In the late Soviet era--the Perestroika period--the Russian Federation's childbearing patterns held more or less at the levels required for long-term population replacement. By contrast, in the early years of the 21st Century, Russia's fertility rates have been almost 40 percent below the replacement level. Although the Kremlin unveiled an ambitious and expensive pro-natal population program several years ago, this seems to have elicited only a modest increase in births. According to official Russian reports, birth totals in the first four months of 2009 were up, albeit slightly, on a year-to-year basis--but death rates remained substantially higher than birth rates. ...

What distinguishes modern-day Russia's demography from the rest of Europe's is not its fertility trends, however, but rather its patterns of mortality and survival, which can be described as shocking--or even disastrous. In the post-war era, the modern world has been all but exploding with health. According to the UN's Population Division, for the planet as a whole, life expectancy at birth jumped by about twenty years between the early 1950s and the early 2000s. Russia has been an exception to this global rule: according to those same UN estimates, the country's life expectancy was actually two years lower in 2000-2005 than in the late 1950s. Though there has been some recovery since 2005, life expectancy for both males and females in the Russian Federation is lower now than it was four decades ago.

Labels: demographics, Europe, natalism, poverty, Russia

VOTE

Russia marked Day of Married Love and Family Happiness on Wednesday, an official holiday which coincides with Peter and Fevronia Day, the Orthodox patron saints of married couples.

Festivities in Moscow and other regions included charity concerts and other events involving orphans, newlyweds and elderly couples. ...

Russia's parliamentary speaker, Boris Gryzlov, said on Wednesday that the number of people getting married had increased, while divorces were down despite the ongoing global economic crisis. He also said birth rate has grown over the last few years.

Labels: Marriage, Russia

VOTE