Demographer Anatoly VISHNEVSKY on why presidential measures will not help “increase” the Russian population “NO HOPES FOR INCREASED FERTILITY RATE IN RUSSIA” On January 15, Vladimir Putin delivered his annual Address to the Federal Assembly. Despite rumors that the main theme of this year's Address would be poverty, the president devoted half of the time to demography. Benefits will be the main tool in combating the demographic crisis.

What's happening? Why? Is it possible to implement the national project “Demography”? Anatoly VISHNEVSKY, director of the Institute of Demography at the Higher School of Economics, answers Novaya's questions. - According to an old parable, 7 blind men who felt an elephant told how they imagined it, and it turned out that they were describing completely different animals... How does a demographer imagine the image of Russia? - Not very good.

— In the report on human development in Russia, published several years ago, entitled “Russia in the Face of Demographic Challenges,” there is a section called “The revival of otkhodnichestvo: temporary or permanent?” (Report on the development of human potential in the Russian Federation 2008. Russia in the face of demographic challenges. - M.: UNDP, 2008. P.

19 years later, our correspondent found the woman she was walking with in a crowd of refugees in Nagorno-Karabakh and her daughter. The war never released the girl born on the night of the attack I met her in Karabakh exactly 19 years ago, at dawn on February 26, 1992. She was a prisoner, and her four children were prisoners. And I was a journalist who came to the war - and together with the people who took her prisoner. At first I didn’t see her, but some strange snow cloud rolling towards us.

The trap of modernization is that it cannot be conservative! Anatoly VISHNEVSKY Director of the Institute of Demography, State University - Higher School of Economics For at least a hundred years now, perhaps longer, Russia has been modernizing, climbing a painful spiral that is taking it further and further away from its traditional existence within the framework of an agrarian, rural, natural-economic civilization and integrating it into a new, urban, commercial-industrial, market environment.

Negative demographic trends, along with the curse of raw materials, are becoming the most serious problem in Russia, which is facing depopulation. The authorities are faced with the problem of not just “saving the people,” but “recreating them.” How and due to what? For an answer to this question, Novaya turned to the most recognized demographer in the country, Anatoly VISHNEVSKY.

Anatoly VISHNEVSKY *, demographer: — The deplorable situation with the birth rate was known 20 years ago. If in 1987 2 and a half million children were born, approximately half of which were boys, then in 1997 only 990 thousand, that is, there were half as many boys.

Why do VIPs have their license plates changed if they get into an accident? On Thursday at 8.05 am, an accident occurred on Leninsky Prospekt near Gagarin Square in Moscow. Two cars collided: a black Mercedes S-Class and a red Citroen C3. The Citroen was moving towards the area. "Mercedes" - to the city center. As a result of the collision, the Citroen driver, 36-year-old Olga Alexandrina, died on the spot.

There will be no demographic explosion: there is no one to give birth Anatoly VISHNEVSKY, demographer, head of the Center for Demography and Human Ecology: - Let’s assume that with the beginning of the implementation of the presidential strategy in 2007, the number of second and third children will actually begin to increase.