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Kim Murphy
Excellence in Media Award
Category | Newspaper, Magazine, & Major Print Publications
The China AIDS Media Project
Hello to all of you, and please accept my thanks, and great sense of honor, for this award. It is a testimony, I think, to the sense of alarm many people feel as they begin to understand what is happening in today’s Russia.
I was posted in Moscow for three years. During that time, two of our six Russian employees--one third of the local staff in our bureau—died of natural causes.
Sasha, who was 62, had problems with his kidneys and consulted a doctor. He was admitted to a hospital in his local village that had blood-stained sheets and no food—his wife had to bring his meals from home—and was treated for what was diagnosed as a kidney infection. The symptoms persisted, and he underwent a bladder procedure. When his family asked if he might have cancer, the urologist who was seeing him said it was unlikely. It was nearly a year later when his cancer was diagnosed, and by then it was too late—he died.
Viktor, a lovely, constantly wisecracking man of 57 who drove my children back and forth to school each day and ran other errands for our office, was driving his wife home from her job one day six months ago when he suddenly pulled the car over to the side of the road, looked into his wife’s eyes almost apologetically, she said, and died.
The closest friend of our computer repairman, Roman, had a tooth extracted, developed an infection, and died two weeks later.
Outside our bureau, I was walking down the street to buy a sandwich for lunch and came across the dead body of a stricken pedestrian at the side of the road. The police were being summoned, but meanwhile, people were walking and driving around the corpse as if it were commonplace—which it was.
At one of my dinner parties, my husband and I and the guests had to go down to the parking lot in the midst of the festivities because a middle-aged man had collapsed behind one of the guest’s cars, and the security guards weren’t interested in doing anything about him.
This is just what happened to me. The average life expectancy of the Russian male—about 58—rivals much of sub-Saharan Africa. The population shrank by 680,000 last year. To drive across interior Russia is to come across village after village officially listed as “depopulated,” meaning its inhabitants have moved elsewhere, or have died. Unlike western European countries whose shrinking populations are driven by a declining birth rate, Russia has both a meager birth rate and an extremely high mortality rate, particularly among men, who fall victim to vodka, smoking, road accidents, heart attacks, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis—any way that you can imagine to die before your time, the Russian male has figured out a way to do it.
The health care system is decent for those in Moscow and other large cities who can afford to pay for it. In other areas of the country, a 55-year-old man who needs heart bypass surgery may often have to accept that he’s pretty well succeeded in reaching the average male life expectancy.
The most extreme projections suggest that the nation’s population could fall to as little as a third of its present level by 2080 if current trends persist.
As I found in my reporting, this is a problem not only for Russia, but for all of us. It is not just that Russia becomes an incubator for diseases like AIDS and multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis that then spreads to the rest of Europe on the next plane. But a nation that cannot maintain a viable population level in Siberia along the Chinese border becomes, half a century down the road, a potential threat to global stability as well.
Fortunately, the Russian government is mindful of the problem, and both the U.S. government and international NGOs have stepped in to pour more money into the health care system, expand AIDS education programs and adopt strict regimes of treatment for tuberculosis patients to slow the spread of the most dangerous strains of the disease.
But it will take time for these programs to work, and in the end, they do not address one of the fundamental cores of the problem—the fact that large numbers of Russians are too poor to have a decent life, and too disillusioned to believe that situation will change in their lifetimes. It can change. Russia is earning billions from its oil and gas revenues, and looks to continue raking in cash during most of our lifetimes. But refocusing the beneficiaries of the windfall and closing the growing gap between rich and poor will require a massive political will on the part of the Russians—and equally massive support from the West for those determined and courageous enough to demand change.
Once again, I thank you for recognizing the importance of this issue, and challenge you to become part of the solution.
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