Johnson's Russia List
#5397
18 August 2001
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#2
The Russia Journal
August 17-23, 2001
Bureaucrats endanger Russia
By OTTO LATSIS

A few months ago, President Vladimir Putin gave demographers hope when he
spoke about population issues, displaying a depth of knowledge unusual for
a politician. While many politicians, especially on the left, poured forth
populist rhetoric about "the extinction of Russia" and "the genocide of the
Russian people" brought about by reforms, Putin talked about how processes
such as increasing urbanization lead to a decline in the birth rate.
Meeting with scientists in Novosibirsk, he came across as being well-informed.

Direct state measures have never proved effective in raising the birth
rate. Many European countries now face population decline, and most of them
don't see any tragedy in this. It does lead to labor shortages, but that
can be resolved by bringing in immigrant labor.

A falling population in Russia, however, leads to more than just labor
shortages. Population density in huge areas of Russia is already low, and
if it continues to fall the question will arise as to whether Russia can
hold on to these territories. This is particularly visible in the Far East,
where the Russian population is falling as people migrate to the European
part of the country and the number of legal and illegal Chinese immigrants
keeps growing.

Some demographers predict that by the end of the century 10 million to 20
million Chinese will have settled in Russia - several times more than the
current total population of the Far Eastern regions. This situation has the
potential to create a new and much bigger Kosovo-type scenario.

Given that there won't be any radical rise in the birth rate over the
coming decades, reducing the mortality rate and encouraging immigration are
the only solutions. It is possible to bring the mortality rate down, but
this would only slow population decline and not stop it altogether. This
leaves increased immigration as the only realistic solution.

In this area, Russia has important reserves to draw on - tens of millions
of former Soviet citizens, Russian-speakers in neighboring countries. Many
of these people want to move to Russia either for economic reasons or
because of the discrimination they are subject to in some of the
post-Soviet republics. Even without any official encouragement, immigrant
flows into Russia in the early 1990s compensated for three-quarters of the
natural population decline.

But those days have passed. This year, immigration growth is compensating
natural population decline by only 6 percent - a record low level. Clearly,
the process won't develop sufficiently of its own accord, and it's time to
put in place a state policy to encourage immigration. The difficulties
involved are obvious - it will cost money. But there is a lot that can be
done at no cost: removing administrative barriers, for example.

The new draft law on citizenship provided a good opportunity for moving in
this direction. The bill has finally been introduced by the president to
the Duma. Specialists' assessments of it don't make for much optimism -
previous discriminatory barriers will remain in place, and the bill will
make it much more difficult to obtain Russian citizenship.

It contains clear violations of human rights. The previous formula, that
every person has a right to citizenship, is to be replaced with the idea
that the state will encourage giving citizenship to people without
citizenship living on Russian territory. Instead of human rights, the bill
gives priority to the will of the state and takes a restrictive approach,
making citizenship a right only for people without citizenship and only if
they live in Russia.

The representatives of the presidential administration who worked on the
bill insist on making it law that a Russian citizen who takes citizenship
of a country with which Russia has no dual nationality agreement
automatically loses his Russian citizenship. Likewise, a foreigner can
become a Russian citizen only by renouncing his original citizenship.

But this is one area in which the state and the individual share the same
interests. Both immigrants and the Russian state want the Russian
population to increase. What we have ended up with is a uniquely absurd
situation in which the state is introducing a new law that will act not
only against the interests of potential citizens, but against its own
interests as well. The fact that the bill was introduced by Putin, who had
seemed so understanding of the state interests involved, makes it
particularly hard to fathom the reasoning behind it.

There's no point trying to guess how this happened. Obviously, the
interests of bureaucrats who don't want to deal with a whole bunch of new
citizens ran counter to the interests of the state, and the bureaucrats won.

This is symptomatic of what is happening in government in general at the
moment. A similar situation is happening with respect to economic reform. A
year ago, the authorities approved a government economic development
strategy drawn up by Minister for Economic Development and Trade German
Gref and his team on Putin's orders. Several days ago, the same Putin
ordered Secretary of the Security Council Vladimir Rushailo to create a
working group to prepare a draft economic-security strategy. The group's
members and the draft plans for the future document leave no doubt that it
could destroy the economic-development strategy. How much damage can
Russian bureaucrats cause?

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