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Cha`o qui' vi.,

Kinh nghie^.m cu?a Nga kho^ng pha?i la` kinh nghie^.m duy
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thi` nguo+`i di da^n va` ngu+o+`i Me^~ ta(ng le^n\.

Co^.ng ddo^`ng ngu+o+`i Vie^.t o+? ha?i ngoa.i cu~ng se~
bi. gia?m da^n so^' trong tu+o+ng lai\.

Cha`o

Pha.m Quo^'c Bi`nh
http://vmdd.tech.mylinuxisp.com/buddhism/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tutam/


------------------------------------------------
Nguo^`n: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/4255853.html

Oct. 13, 2006, 2:32AM
VANISHING RUSSIA
In a nation that's losing more people than it's gaining, Putin
is offering financial incentives to repopulate

Trying to restore region's greatness


By KIM MURPHY
Los Angeles Times

KSTINOVO, RUSSIA — Welcome to Kstinovo, population one.

Antonina Makarova, 78, spends her days watching news and soap
operas in her peeling wooden dacha, the only inhabited structure
in two lanes of sagging cottages that once were a village. Her
nearest neighbor, 80-year-old Maria Belkova, lives in adjacent
Sosnovitsy, population two. But Belkova can't hear anymore,
and all in all, Makarova finds the television better company.

"All the houses here were filled with people. There was a cheese
factory. But now everyone else has died. God has taken care of
them, and he's still making me suffer," Makarova said. "Even
the thieves have disappeared."

The Tver region, along the upper reaches of the Volga River 130
miles north of Moscow, is dotted with more than 1,400 villages
such as Kstinovo marked "nezhiloye" — depopulated. Since 1989,
the number of people here has shrunk by about 250,000 to about
1.4 million, with deaths outnumbering births more than 2 to 1.

Russia is the only major industrial nation that is losing
population. Its people are succumbing to one of the world's
fastest-growing AIDS epidemics, resurgent tuberculosis, rampant
cardiovascular disease, alcohol and drug abuse, smoking,
suicide and the lethal effects of unchecked industrial pollution.

The public health-care system is collapsing. And many parents
in more prosperous urban areas say they can't afford homes
large enough for the number of children they'd like to have.

The former Soviet Union, with about 300 million people,
was the world's third-most populous country, behind China
and India. Slightly more than half of its citizens lived in
Russia. The country has lost the equivalent of a city of 700,000
people every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
only partially offset by an influx of people from other former
Soviet republics. A country that sprawls across one-eighth of
the globe is now home to 142 million people.

The losses have been disproportionately male. At the height of
its power, the Soviet Union's people lived almost as long as
Americans. But now, the average Russian man can expect to live
about 59 years, 16 years less than an American man and 14 less
than a Russian woman.

Sergei Mironov, chairman of the upper house of Russia's
parliament, said last year that if the trend didn't change,
the population would fall to 52 million by 2080.

"There will no longer be a great Russia," he said. "It will be
torn apart piece by piece, and finally cease to exist."

Russian officials, flush with revenue from record prices for
the country's oil exports, have started to respond. President
Vladimir Putin this year pledged payments of $111 a month to
mothers who elected to have a second child, plus a nest egg of
$9,260 to be used for education, a mortgage or pensions.

"Russia has a huge territory, the largest territory in the
world," Putin said. "If the situation remains unchanged, there
will simply be no one to protect it."


Plunge into poverty
The economic earthquake of Russia's transition from communism
to capitalism plunged tens of millions into poverty overnight
and changed the value systems upon which many had planned
their lives.

A small minority, mostly in urban centers such as Moscow and
St. Petersburg, were able to exploit the absence of rules in
the chaotic 1990s to become fabulously wealthy. But such a
profound social transition, coming at the end of a century of
war, revolution and ruthless social experimentation, condemned
a great many more to a deep malaise.

Those who lost out have proved susceptible to drinking, smoking
and other habits that killed millions of Russians even in the
best of times. In more extreme cases, they kill themselves.