I’ve written on Russia’s demographic death spiral in this space many times, and, interestingly enough, always receive by way of response extremely bloodcurdling death threats from Slavs who regard it as some sort of imperialist running-dog propaganda. So here’s the eminently respectable Nicholas Eberstadt in World Affairs Journal:

Between 1976 and 1991, the last sixteen years of Soviet power, the country recorded 36 million births. In the sixteen post-Communist years of 1992–2007, there were just 22.3 million, a drop in childbearing of nearly 40 percent from one era to the next. On the other side of the life cycle, a total of 24.6 million deaths were recorded between 1976 and 1991, while in the first sixteen years of the post-Communist period the Russian Federation tallied 34.7 million deaths, a rise of just over 40 percent. The symmetry is striking . . .
According to Human Rights Watch, over 100,000 children in Russia have been abandoned by their parents each year since 1996. If accurate, this number, compared to the annual tally of births for the Russian Federation, which averaged about 1.4 million a year for the 1996–2007 period, would suggest that in excess of 7 percent of Russia’s children are being discarded by their parents in this new era of steep sub-replacement fertility . . .
On today’s mortality patterns, a Swiss man at 20 has about an 87 percent chance of making it to a notional retirement age of 65. His Russian counterpart at age 20 has less than even odds of reaching 65 . . .

Eberstadt restates a point I made in America Alone: “History offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline.” That’s relevant to Western Europe and Japan, too. But Russia’s combination of pathologies — low life expectancy, endemic violence, AIDS and alcholism, restive Muslims, insecure nukes — is a particularly volatile cocktail. I say somewhere in my book that, just as the rise of Russia caused a ton of problems for the world in the 20th century, so its collapse will cause as many, if not more, in the 21st. But, when you look at what they do, from Georgia to Iran, the demographic sickness is the key to what passes for strategy.