Decline and alco­holism exist in the Russ­ian country-side. The death-rate in many rural vil­lages is high and is a cause of pop­u­la­tion decline. What is hap­pen­ing in rural Rus­sia is sum­ma­rized by Tom Las­seter of McClatchy.

The gov­ern­ment admin­is­tra­tor was burst­ing with opti­mism: More chil­dren are being born, many rubles will be invested in infra­struc­ture and his region is weath­er­ing the global eco­nomic storm.

“The sit­u­a­tion is so good,” said Boris Zait­sev, a broad-shouldered man who spoke in a con­fi­dent monot­one.

Out­side his office, some 170 miles north­west of Moscow, the front steps to the Soviet-era gov­ern­ment build­ing are falling into a pile of rub­ble. Deep, spine-rattling pot­holes that rival sec­tions of Bagh­dad rid­dle the town’s streets. The region’s pop­u­la­tion has plum­meted by more than a quarter.

Offi­cials here like to point vis­i­tors to Kuvshinovo’s new Russ­ian Ortho­dox church, an ele­gant wooden struc­ture. Work inside the church hasn’t been fin­ished, because the money ran out. Loot­ers search­ing for icons and cash pre­vi­ously torched the office of another local church. Twice. A priest in a nearby vil­lage, who’d led an anti-alcoholism cam­paign, was burned to death with his family.

The area around this rural enclave is in steep decline; once-thriving fields are empty and the pop­u­la­tion is in free-fall. Along with many other towns and vil­lages in vast rural Rus­sia, it’s a micro­cosm for a coun­try that, accord­ing to recent stud­ies, is with­er­ing away.

In Kuvshi­novo and out­ly­ing ham­lets, the pop­u­la­tion has dropped to 16,000 peo­ple from 22,000 in less than 20 years. Rus­sia as a whole lost 12.3 mil­lion peo­ple from 1992 to 2008. An influx of immi­grants, mainly from for­mer Soviet ter­ri­to­ries, helped hide the extent of the prob­lem. The pop­u­la­tion is now 142 mil­lion, but it would have been 136.3 mil­lion with­out that surge from outside.

The sta­tis­tics help explain why Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden struck such a sen­si­tive nerve among Russia’s rul­ing elite when he said recently that the coun­try has “a shrink­ing pop­u­la­tion base; they have a with­er­ing econ­omy,” and added, “It’s a very dif­fi­cult thing to deal with, loss of empire.”

Despite the Kremlin’s pos­tur­ing on the world stage and its hard line in what Rus­sians call the “near abroad” — invad­ing Geor­gia, shut­ting off nat­ural gas to Ukraine, claim­ing a priv­i­leged sphere in other post-Soviet ter­ri­to­ries — the decay in the heart­land sug­gests that Rus­sia isn’t a resur­gent super­power so much as a nation that’s try­ing not to come apart at the seams.

The man­sions and gar­dens of old impe­r­ial Rus­sia have faded or crum­bled, as have many of the col­lec­tive farms that fed com­mu­nist Rus­sia. Today, the ham­lets dot a for­saken land of ram­pant poverty where men drink from morn­ing to night. The inter­con­nected crises of low fer­til­ity, high death rates and ragged infra­struc­ture have left much of the nation barren.

Look­ing over the hay­fields that lead to the onion dome and the glis­ten­ing gold cross of a steeple a few miles out­side Kuvshi­novo, a Russ­ian Ortho­dox priest mulled the ques­tion: What’s hap­pen­ing to Russia?

“There are vil­lages with only two peo­ple left, and oth­ers where nobody lives,” Alexan­der Peshekhonov said, choos­ing his words care­fully. Peshekhonov, his gray hair pulled back in a pony­tail, added the oblig­a­tory caveat that, “Our coun­try is great.”

He then flicked a fin­ger at his throat, a ges­ture mean­ing, “They drink.”

When spring comes around, he said, the bod­ies of locals who fell drunk­enly into the snow­drifts of win­ter are found in the pas­tures and roads. One man respon­si­ble for burn­ing the church office in Kuvshi­novo was caught in a mar­ket, sell­ing icons and reli­gious cas­sette tapes he’d swiped to raise money for vodka.

“If you read the news­pa­pers and lis­ten to our lead­ers’ pro­pa­ganda, you get the feel­ing that every­thing is OK,” Peshekhonov said. “But I don’t believe that.”

A major study that the United Nations released in April, authored by lead­ing Russ­ian experts, pro­jected that Rus­sia would lose at least 11 mil­lion more peo­ple by 2025. Another U.N.-sponsored report said last year that the pop­u­la­tion could fall to as low as 100 mil­lion in 2050.

That report cited a recent improve­ment in fer­til­ity but cau­tioned that, “while these favor­able trends may last another five or six years, all recent fore­casts … pre­dict that Russia’s pop­u­la­tion decline will only intensify.”

“There’s a risk that in the most neg­a­tive sit­u­a­tion, Rus­sia will stop exist­ing as a state,” said Olga Isupova, a senior demo­graphic researcher at the Higher School of Eco­nom­ics, a lead­ing pri­vate Russ­ian uni­ver­sity in Moscow.

Down a dusty road and then a dirt path from Kuvshi­novo, Dr. Anna Voronova holds med­ical clin­ics in the vil­lage of Prya­mukhino. Sit­ting behind her desk in a dimly lit room with warped floors and chipped paint, Voronova said she saw a lot of peo­ple with drink­ing prob­lems. She didn’t mean just vodka and beer.

“They buy house­hold clean­ers, or sol­vents used to clean a machine, and drink it because it’s cheap,” she said. “It’s not one or two peo­ple; it’s many people.”

There were 720 peo­ple liv­ing around Prya­mukhino in 1990. Today, there are about 500, a decline caused in part by an exo­dus to Russia’s cities, but mostly by the fact that deaths out­num­ber births.

The talk of alco­holism isn’t con­fined to hand­wring­ing cler­gy­men and small-town doc­tors. A study pub­lished this June exam­ined three Russ­ian indus­trial cities with typ­i­cal mor­tal­ity trends and found that dur­ing the 1990s, more than half of the deaths of those aged 15 to 54 were alcohol-related.

The find­ings, authored by a blue-ribbon panel of experts includ­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Russ­ian can­cer research cen­ter and the Uni­ver­sity of Oxford, sug­gest that Rus­sia is drink­ing itself to death.

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