Zinaida Vissarionovna Yermolyeva on a 2023 Russian postcard
It’s bad enough in other parts of the world but in Russia it’s much worse, and President Vladimir Putin can hardly blame Ukraine for it (although he probably will). It’s not as if Russian women have not played leading roles in science, engineering or mathematics in the past, because they have. Take for example, Zinaida Vissarionovna Yermolyeva (1898-1974), one of the great developers of antibiotics. She decided on medicine as a career in 1915 following the death from cholera of her favourite composer, Pyotr Tchaikovsky. She devoted her life to fighting that disease and others, which is why she entered Donskoy State University, graduating in 1921. During the Second World War, she prevented a cholera epidemic from spreading in Stalingrad by developing a vaccine called crustosin, which turned out to be even more effective than penicillin. She developed a number of other drugs and treatments, too. Between 1962 and 1964, 40 percent of the chemistry PhD’s awarded in Soviet Russia went to women. At that same time in the United States, that number was a measly five percent. Russia led the scientific field.
Then there was (among a great many others) Sofya Kovalevskaya in the 19th century, who became the world’s first female professor. Her subject, at which she excelled, was mathematics, which she had loved since childhood, apparently through studying the lecture notes of Mikhail Ostrogradsky about differential and integral calculus. He was in fact a Ukrainian mathematician, mechanician, and physicist of Ukrainian Cossack ancestry, but back in those Soviet Union days they were counted as one country. Some stories about Kovalevskaya claim that the notes were used as wallpaper in her bedroom, but that could be untrue. There have been plenty of other brilliant female exponents of science, technology, engineering and maths and there still are, although it’s more difficult for a female student to get onto a course in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (normally shortened to STEM) than it is for men, and it’s getting worse, especially in Russia. It’s not getting better fast in many other places, either. In 2015 just 25% of STEM students around the western world were female. By 2019-22 it had only risen to 27%, and that’s in the supposedly enlightened countries. It’s much worse in Russia, despite that country’s enviable record for producing brilliant female scientists, mathematicians and engineers. So, what is going on?
Perhaps we should look to Vladimir Putin (who else?) and his permanent, if somewhat fictional and even personal, war, which won’t end any time soon since he used his “victory” (in a fake non-election) to secure the top position until 2036. He claims this imaginary war as his reason to hang on to power, however ill-deserved. He has told the Russian people that he is maintaining a permanent war against the West, which means he must use all his country’s natural resources, making Russia’s politics and economics unnecessarily fragile. According to the budget for 2024, military expenditure will be 1.7 times more than in the previous year, reaching 25% of all spending, while returns on the sale of exports, especially oil and gas, continue to dwindle.
Putin has tried half-heartedly to justify his invasion and in point of fact, he has a valid point. It stems from the fact that in the East of Ukraine there is a sizeable population of native Russian speakers, while in the rest of the country (the largest portion) they speak Ukrainian. Putin claimed, with some justification, that Russian speakers weren’t being treated fairly; they were getting less from the state than Ukrainian speakers. He wrote a long, if somewhat rambling essay outlining their grumbles, and he had a valid point. Hosting the 2018 FIFA World Cup brought in lots of money and gave him a war chest large enough to sustain quite a long war, with the world’s 4th largest foreign currency reserves standing at $500-billion (€460-billion) and with no fear of further sanctions. After all, with Donald Trump (who apparently admires Putin) likely to win the White House and with pro-Russian sympathisers in Hungary but also in France and Italy, he believed he was home and dry, especially as Britain’s exit from the EU had weakened it (and it had). He really thought, it seems, that any response from the West would be weak and fairly ineffectual. It was a serious miscalculation on his part that has cost Russia dearly in the scale human resources needed to fight a war.
The artificial extension of his mandate to 2036 has not pleased a population keen for a return to peace and normality, so in order to keep his people “happy” he has spent a fortune on social issues and favourable treatment for the poor. One critic has accused him of turning Russia into his own private Barbieland, while the wider Russia is forced to adapt in order to survive. The people formed queues to say goodbye to Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who died in an Arctic Circle prison at the young age of just 47. Many brought flowers and Navalny’s widow has openly said that Putin should be tried for his murder, although we all know he never will be. Navalny was buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of Moscow where his supporters chanted: “Russia without Putin” and “Russia will be free”. Putin’s claims of his personal popularity would seem to be exaggerated. Navalny had been serving a nineteen-year sentence for alleged “extremism”, which in modern Russia simply means not supporting Putin. Putin clearly underestimated Navalny’s popularity, choosing to believe instead that the people love him, Putin, more than peace, food or freedom of choice. Apparently, they don’t.
| WHERE HAVE ALL THE TECHNICIANS GONE ?
Russia has seen a demographic decline, but Putin doesn’t appear to know how to fix that. It is also seeing a decline in the numbers of women choosing a STEM career. Indeed in 2020 women made up just 20% of the students studying STEM subjects. That is easier to understand: the government in Moscow is urging women towards producing more children, rather than entering upon a career, however much the skills thus acquired may ultimately benefit the state. It’s a very short-sighted attitude on Putin’s part, although that is nothing new. He is seeing, however, a considerable loss of his soldiers in Ukraine, so he supposedly feels he should seek to replace them, although it’ll be a few years before they’re old enough to don battle fatigues and go to the front. It’s not just men losing their lives in Putin’s war; many have been leaving the country to avoid conscription, although nobody seems to be clear about the actual death rate. For the population to increase, it’s a no-win situation. Even Russia’s own statistics show that the birthrate there has been going down since 2016-2017. Publishers in the country have complained that the market for children’s books has shrunk considerably and a 23% reduction in numbers among children aged 5 to 9 has been noted. It matches the decline in the 0 to 4 age group seen between 2017 and 2022.
Not surprisingly, there has also been a marked reduction in the numbers willing to go into heavy industry jobs, as well as the military. The state statistical service predicts that by 2046, Russia’s population (not including the territories seized from Ukraine) will shrink by 15.5 million people, which equates to a population decline of 700,000 people per year. What’s more, the war has seen vast amounts of money diverted away from such things as education and health care, while Russia faces a terrible shortage of vital medicines such as insulin. The one thing that is going inexorably up is alcoholism. Russia, as one commentator pointed out, is neither stable nor normal. The language issue, though, still rankles among the Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
It was Nelson Mandela who wisely said: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.” That difference is one of the key points of tension between Ukrainian and Russian speakers. The same issue has blighted relations in many places, including the UK, where Scottish people wanted more use made of their language, Gaelic (often referred to as Scots). So did the people of Wales, of course, who favoured Welsh. Iechyd da! (It means “cheers, by the way) although in Belgium, which has two official languages plus a few German speakers, you can get by with French or Flemish (which is Dutch with a slight accent) and since most Belgians speak both and they are of equal importance, either will effectively do. But of course, it’s more than a matter of language that divides Ukrainians and Russians, whatever Putin may say. For his part, he has been getting more and more authoritarian for a number of years, even bringing back the old Stalinist anthem, albeit with different words. Now he seems to take pride in his extreme nationalism.
| BEING CHASTE, NOT CHASED
Putin still refers to his war as being “to save his people”, which it very clearly isn’t. Yes, I know most (dare I say “all”?) politicians lie, but mainly it’s to win a few votes or interest a possible investor in some pet project they have and from which they may profit. Putin seems to lie all the time. Russian authorities have been trying to dissuade people from having abortions, and it’s not just to please their Christian citizens who favour such a ban. They just want more babies, but people have seldom viewed abortions as a form of birth control. It’s too major a course of action for that. But Putin has one big ally in his fight against abortion: the Russian Orthodox Church, which has close ties with the Kremlin. The faith is also popular in Ukraine, where a mosaic of St. Gregory of Nyssa is displayed in Kyiv. The Fathers of the Church were, by tradition, men with a commanding presence, afraid of no-one, least of all emperors. Gregory, however, never raised his voice, it’s said, he cast no thunderbolts (at least, according to the British writer Robert Payne’s book about the Eastern Orthodox church, “The Holy Fire”), and he genuinely loved his people, which certainly doesn’t seem to be a trait shared with Putin. He has been compared with St. Francis of Assisi and is recalled as having been “contemplative and joyful”, according to Payne.
Another thing Putin might not have liked about him was his first book, “On Virginity”, in which he urged women to remain chaste. Putin wants women to have lots of children to repopulate the country, so it’s a point on which they may have clashed. St. Gregory was married, by the way, with a talent for speaking and for writing, despite a fairly poor education. Clearly never a candidate for STEM research, then.
Stalin, on the other hand, was a model student; his mother hoped he would become a priest; he was noted as a gifted reader of prayers and as a singer in the church choir, and his school’s Russian teacher made him his assistant, distributing books. Decades later he arranged a pension for another former teacher, S.V. Malinovsky whom he had liked and admired and who, late in his life, wrote: “I am proud that my humble efforts contributed to your education”. He asked for a pension, to which Stalin agreed, “so that in the twilight of my days,” Malinovsky wrote, “my basic needs can be met, and I can die in the happy awareness that my Great Pupil did not leave me in poverty.” Of course, he left a great number of ordinary Russians in dire straits, far worse than mere poverty. Many of them didn’t survive his purges at all.
But back to Putin now, and his wide range of rather different problems. For a man committed to his own personal war for his own personal reasons, Russia’s current ageing population and shortage of skilled workers and of people prepared to work in heavy industry must be a huge embarrassment. Putin has talked about encouraging couples to move to the countryside for a more rural existence in the odd belief that a rural setting will encourage more procreation, whereas the shortage of medical and other facilities, not to mention shops, so far from the city is more likely to discourage people from having more children. Putin reads and believes old books, it appears, without checking their veracity or their relevance to today’s world and Russia’s population problems. And, of course, no foreign power has invaded Russia, so its soldiers are not “fighting for the motherland”. According to one of Putin’s senior advisors, the regime sees the Ukraine conflict as an “existential war” (which, according to the Cambridge dictionary, means “a system of ideas according to which the world has no meaning, and each person is alone and completely responsible for his or her own actions”). So don’t blame anyone else if things go wrong. Got that, Vlad?
| WHERE IS EVERYONE?
Russia suffers from a significant labour shortage, which has been described as “a demographic time bomb”. It doesn’t just affect female STEM students. It’s a wide-ranging issue: back in 2023 Russian job vacancies exceeded the numbers of potential workers by two million. That is an enormous gap that will be very hard, possibly impossible, to bridge. Some observers see it as the inevitable consequence of becoming a “post-industrial” society. One problem is that Putin has a need for soldiers and for people to work in Russia’s military-industrial factories, but most Russians don’t want their children to grow up to be soldiers or factory workers. The regime talks a lot about “saving the people” although it really means “saving Putin’s position”. According to experts, by 2035 there will be three to four million fewer Russians in employment, with the proportion of young people in the labour market dropping dramatically, while the level of education, they say, will stagnate.
According to Carnegie Politika, in 2022, Putin ordered the government to draw up a package of measures by last year that will increase birth rates and extend life expectancy in Russia. He said he could not understand the country’s falling birth rates in many parts of the country. As is the case with many of Putin’s policies, it doesn’t really make sense. As a suggested cure, his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, proposed changing the male conscription age from 18 to 21 and raising the upper age limit from 27 to 30, which would mean young men going off to war after getting their college degrees while trained specialists would be forced out of the jobs market with their skills made void by military service. How does Putin think that will help countermand his falling population? If men go off to war (or emigrate to avoid it) who will father all these much-needed children? After all, the Russian economy is already expected to lose up to 4-million people by 2030. But there are other reasons than the war.
The number of Russian women of child-bearing age is falling, while the age at which women are prepared to set aside their work and have children is rising. Furthermore, with the war set to continue indefinitely, many couples are opting not to produce what may turn out to be simple “cannon-fodder” to feed Putin’s belligerence. Most people understand that the best way to promote population growth is to provide predictable, peaceful conditions in which to raise children. Putin has encouraged the armed forces not to shy away from requesting more cash, but spending on the military is not a productive use of money and does nothing to improve people’s quality of life. It is being spent at the expense of healthcare and education.
Tatyana Klyachko, Director of the Centre for Continuing Education Economics at Russia’s Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration has claimed that in Russia the average number of years spent in education is stagnating, or even falling, reflecting the need of young people to get a job and to start making money. According to Carnegie Politika, the Kremlin sees the skills needed to disassemble and reassemble a Kalashnikov assault rifle as more important. It’s hard to know exactly how much Russia is spending on military equipment because the figures are considered “secret”, although it’s thought that military expenditure came around 23% of Russia’s budget in 2023. The same publication argues that Russia, like other authoritarian regimes, wants to rid itself of high-quality and globally competitive education, and Putin’s war has seen purges carried out at schools and colleges (especially universities). No-one knows, it seems, how many young people with STEM degrees have left the country, either out of the fear of conscription or even of being accused of espionage or treason. If you are engaged in working with sensitive scientific developments, that’s a very real risk, and if you don’t love and admire Putin you must be a traitor anyway. The government has noted that the numbers of secondary school students who plan to take the Unified State Exam in physics and information sciences has fallen. Russia will come to regret that if the country ever reverts to being a normal state, and it seems as if some (at least) of the country’s leaders have noticed it. Russia was once a world leader in computer technology, but it seems to have sacrificed that lead on the altar of Putin’s ego.
As for Putin’s education, he seems to have shone quite well at his local elementary school in St. Petersburg, but it was always his dream to be a spy, something he achieved by joining the KGB. He is exceedingly rich – some estimates say he’s the richest man in the world – but he is not helping his country economically. If he manages to survive until 2036 (as he intends) he will be Russia’s longest-serving ruler since Stalin. Furthermore, a modern, high-quality education is inclined to produce people who think for themselves. That wouldn’t please Putin, who prefers people who simply obey orders without ever questioning them. As Carnegie Politika points out, one of the problems is that the future lives and occupations of Russia’s young people are being decided by a bunch of geriatrics in their seventies, which is not a sensible or even a healthy way to face the world of 2024 and beyond. It certainly doesn’t help the country to increase its population. So where does Russia go from here? Nobody really knows, although Putin seems to have decided he’ll continue to rule it until the sun goes out. It’s worrying that the country’s vast potential is being wasted because of one man’s insane ego. The land of Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky deserves a better memorial than one egotist who wants to rule the world. After all, he never will.
