The Death of Birth — Our Dismal Fertility Rates

Through Collapsed Fertility Rates, We Are Self-Exterminating

Response to Collapsed Fertility Rates and Falling Populations: Part of a Russian March toward Totalitarianism?

Map of Russia 

In reference to Russia’s anemic fertility rates and shrinking population, Russian president Vladimir Putin has stated, “We are on the verge of a crisis… Our main priority today is to decrease the death rate and increase the birth rate, as well as to improve our migration policy.” Demographic forecasts predict that Russia will lose nearly one million people a year over the next decade. According to this report, it seems that, unfortunately, Mr. Putin’s authoritarian regime may be using the grave dangers of collapsed fertility rates as an opportunity to expand its power.

As shown in the article, an organization named “Nashi” is a “youth movement run by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin that has become a central part of Russian political life.” At its annual camp, Nashi hosts 10,000 uniformed youths who engage in physical fitness routines, attend lectures, marry, and “move to a special section of dormitory tents arranged in a heart-shape and called the Love Oasis, where they can start procreating for the motherland.” Attendees at the camp must wear electronic badges, which enable tracking of their participation. Anyone who misses three events is expelled.


More than one foreign official has been harassed by Nashi, part of a 100,000 strong youth movement, after engaging in acts viewed as insulting to Russia in general or to the Kremlin in particular. Details of these practices suggest official complicity.

Other youth organizations now engage in even more radical activities. The Daily Mail states that these “pro-Kremlin youth groups are hounding gays and foreigners off the streets of Moscow. Mestnye [The Locals] recently distributed leaflets urging Muscovites to boycott non-Russian cab drivers.” This movement in Russia has not reached the fanatical levels that are possible, but it’s worth considering the historical precedent of such extremism.

In “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany” author William L. Shirer states that the Hitler Youth in 1932, the year before the Nazis came to power, numbered 107,956. That number would soon increase dramatically.

Shirer devotes several pages to the Nazi youth movement and makes numerous chilling observations. “From the age of six to eighteen, when conscription for the Labor Service and the Army began, girls as well as boys were organized in the various cadres of the Hitler Youth. Parents found guilty of trying to keep their children from joining the organization were subject to heavy prison sentences even though, as in some cases, they merely objected to having their daughters enter some of the services where cases of pregnancy had reached scandalous proportions.”

The author goes on to state “Similar moral problems (out of wedlock, youth pregnancies) also arose during the Household Year for Girls, in which some half a million Hitler Youth maidens spent a year at domestic service in a city household. Actually, the more sincere Nazis did not consider them moral problems at all. On more than one occasion I listened to women leaders … lecture their young charges on the moral and patriotic duty of bearing children for Hitler’s Reich – within wedlock if possible, but without it if necessary.”

Before the dawn of 1939, “the Hitler Youth numbered 7,728,259.”

Due to this Nazi history, contemporary Germany has been loathe to officially encourage procreation. The situation there, however, has become so dire (fertility rates hovering around the ultra-critical level of 1.3 for more than a generation) that childless chancellor Angela Merkel has made fertility a major focus of her administration.

It will behoove us to keep a keen eye on the semi-official Russian youth movement. Many countries can no longer ignore the consequences of their collapsed fertility rates. As a sense of desperation deepens, many a nation may well use the problem as an opportunity to promote totalitarianism.

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