BBC News - Saturday, 24 August, 2002
Rob Watson In Russia

Demographic experts say the country is losing one million people a year and that the nosedive is accelerating.

By some calculations, within 50 years its population will have shrunk by almost half to around 80 million.

The last time the country faced such losses, war and Josef Stalin's voracious purges were to blame.

Now it is poverty, disease, drug and alcohol abuse, and falling birth rates.

Russia appears to be paying a terrible price to shake off the shackles of communism.

But one man, Mikhail Morosov, is determined to make a difference.

Mr Morosov is a millionaire with a mission. I met him on the edge of his estate 150 miles south of Moscow.

He was standing outside a church, one that he had renovated himself, as I drove up in a cloud of dust.

He wasn't pleased. I was late and he stomped the ground like an agitated bull.

"Robert," he asked, placing a meaty hand on my shoulder. "Are you a Christian?"

He fixed me with an inquisitor's glare. Fortunately, perhaps, he had little interest in my answer.

Mikhail has the fervour of a reformed alcoholic and the demented energy of a megalomaniac.

But I shouldn't mock, because at the small village of Durakovo - which translates as the "village of fools" - he has created a remarkable treatment centre for alcohol addiction.

He took me there in one of his Land Rovers - of which, for some inexplicable reason, he has 12.

We drove at breakneck speed across rolling meadows and shallow riverbeds, tossed about like ball-bearings in a pin-ball machine. Punishment, I think, for being late.

Striking difference

Durakovo is unlike any other Russian village. It is clean, it is orderly, the men and women are hard at work and there are no drunks weaving the streets.

The buildings are a surreal mix in which Russian fantasy meets Disney. Mikhail designed them all himself. Make no mistake, he is the boss.

When you sign on at Durakovo you abandon your rights - you work from morning to night for free and you live by Mikhail's rules.

He calls the residents, who are nearly all either alcoholics or drug addicts, his children.

He doesn't let them speak to outsiders unless he is around and he reads their mail. But, as he says, nobody forces them to come and nobody forces them to stay.

Mikhail says the idea came to him from God and what he offers is a very Russian form of Orthodox Christian spirituality.

"I feed their souls," he tells me, as he stuffs a pickled gherkin into my mouth.

It all smacks a little too much of 19th century Russian serfdom - albeit of the more benevolent kind - but it is a sign that if the state is not prepared to act, Russian society is.

Sad history

Alcohol cast a malign shadow across Mikhail's childhood. His father was an alcoholic and his uncle drowned while swimming drunk in the Moscow river.

Mikhail was drinking heavily himself by the time he was 14. A common enough Russian tale and one that he is resolved to fight with a determination that borders on fanaticism.

A national newspaper writes that 340,000 Russians have died from alcohol poisoning since 1991 - and the numbers are climbing.

Yet the Ministry of Health is in no hurry to act - vodka sales are one of the state's biggest sources of revenue.

But the alcohol problem is part of a far deeper malaise. Russia is quite literally dying.

Here is an awful statistic. The life expectancy of the average Russian male is down to 59 years. That is almost 20 years below levels in Western Europe.

Disease, poverty, Aids, drug abuse, war, falling birth rates - all these are responsible.

The mathematics are quite simple. If Russia's population is to hold steady at its present level, every woman has to have 2.4 babies.

As things stand, they are having 1.1, one of the lowest rates in the world.

Aids epidemic looms

Nationalists blame women.

One MP suggested that the solution was to outlaw lesbianism. Others have recommended that women be banned from the labour market and sent home to have children.

Yet there is worse to come. A menace more threatening than anything that has come before is gathering in Russia's midst. An HIV epidemic is stalking the land.

Seven years ago, there was barely a recorded case.

Now there are more than one million and the numbers are multiplying fast.

Sasha and his wife Lena are both HIV positive. Both are in their early 20s and both caught the infection from dirty needles. They are typical cases of Russia's heroin generation.

They live in the Moscow suburb of Sointsevo, a little corner of desolation in the southern reaches of the city.

"Of my old gang, 80% are infected," Sasha tells me.

Reaping the whirlwind

He makes an observation that experts here confirm.

What began as a predominantly drug-related epidemic is now beginning to spread quickly through heterosexual sex.

But this is a country that does not want to know.

The state spends a miserly $6m a year on fighting Aids, and society would rather ostracise the victims than face up to the problem.

Sasha and Lena have a three-year-old son who attends a local kindergarten.

But they dare not let the teachers know that they are his parents for fear they would drive him out of the school.

Russia is about to reap a whirlwind.

In five years, its people are going to start dying of Aids in huge numbers.

But today, when it is still not too late to do something about it, they are looking the other way.
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