When we got on the Metro I noticed that the woman sat down across from the man and the young child sat down next to her father. This appeared quite strange to me until I realized, when the women started signing, that that both husband and wife were deaf; they were sitting across from one another so that they could carry on a civilized conversation. When the woman had signed her piece, the husband started to respond but realized that he was handicapped by his beer. Feeling the urgent need to talk, he handed the beer to his daughter, who, with two hands, obligingly held the half-liter of lager for the duration the journey while mom and dad had a lively conversation across the wagon.
With young mothers smoking walking their babies and men drinking beer at all hours of the day and night, Russian’s health is deteriorating at a precipitous rate. While the health indicators of many former communist countries in Central Europe are improving rapidly, according to many, Russia is on the verge of a health catastrophe, much of it do to heavy smoking and drinking. This trend, among other things, causes my neighbor upstairs, presumably after heavy drinking, to throw all his vodka, beer, gin, and tonic bottles out his window, where they land and remain right outside mine.
In an article in the Moscow Times (originally published in The Washingto Post), journalist Jackson Diehl linked that health of former Communist countries to their chosen political path. While in Poland, a country that has embraced democracy, the average life expectancy has climbed 4 years, in Russia and other CIS countries, that have embraced “managed democracy” or dictatorship average life expectancy has plummeted. Interestingly, the Baltic States’ health indicators dropped right after the collapse of the U.S.S.R, but started to rise again when the started implementing democratic reforms and moving towards joining the E.U.
The snow having melted and the weather having climbed below freezing, I see many mothers strolling with a friend and pushing along their infants’ in a stroller, sometimes letting a bundled-up three or four year old run on ahead. Inevitably, these women are pushing the stroller with one hand and smoking a cigarette in another—albeit often those slim cigarettes that are quite popular with women here. These women don’t even seem to bother to blow the cigarette smoke away from their children. I wonder if they stop when they’re pregnant.
In the end, it's a matter of initiative (not to mimick those tacky Perestroika-era ads), realization, and incredible willpower. The Russian people are disappear at a precipitous rate - many millions have died since 1991. Their life expectancy now stands at aproximately 57 years of age, though most will not reach it. It is time to save Russia from itself, to educate its people, to put foreign money not in the hands of bankers and Kremlin leaders but the people whose backs were broken, toiling in the coal mines, factories, and collective farms to put those animals in power. Little do they care the Russian people are suffering.
Posted by: Joseph on July 10, 2004 08:26 AM