YOU do not need to travel far to find evidence of Russia's demographic problems. Just 250km west of Moscow, in the Smolensk region, it is glaringly obvious. Turn off the main road in the village of Semlevo and you will see rusting gates and derelict buildings. Continue for a short distance on what just about resembles a road and you will see a new cowshed.

A third of the people working here are from Tajikistan. Marina, a 38-year old Russian milkmaid, is married to one of them. Talib, she says, may be strict, but he does not drink or beat her up. She prefers him to her first, Russian, husband who drank himself to death at the age of 47, leaving her with three children. Her 19-year old son is unemployed and drinks heavily.

Talib came to Russia so that he can feed his other family in Tajikistan, and Marina does not mind Talib having another wife. But local residents resent the Tajik and Uzbek migrants because “they are prepared to work for a pittance and take our jobs.” Yet finding sober local working men in the village is difficult, says Sergei Pertsev, the farm manager. “Here, everyone has fallen ill with alcohol.” To make sure the farm functions properly Mr Pertsev keeps people in reserve, to fill in for those who go on a binge. It used to be mainly men who drank, but now women do too.

Semlevo's collective farm was built in 1962. Since then the village's population has dropped to a third of its former level. Thirty years ago the village school had 500 pupils. This year only one girl entered the first grade. Some people have left the village, others have died of drink. Those who remain drink heavily. Still, by local standards, Semlevo, with its 900 residents, is a thriving metropolis. Some nearby villages have just two or three people left.

Novosti

Rare and precious

Tatyana Nefedova, a geographer and specialist on Russian agriculture, calls these deserted areas “Russia's black hole”. In the European part of the country alone they account for one-third of the land mass. Urbanisation has drawn people from villages into larger cities and to the vast industrial building sites in the east and north of the country. Active life is concentrated in a radius of 35-40km from the centre of these large cities. Russia has only 168 cities with a population over 100,000 and their number is dropping. The average distance between large cities is 185km. According to Ms Nefedova, this means that a stretch of 100km between them is a social and economic desert. In villages closer to large cities, especially Moscow and St Petersburg, or in the south of the country, things are better.

But for Mr Pertsev, the idea that Russia is “rising from its knees” seems like a bad joke. Two years ago he lost his son, who was in the army. The young man was killed by a drunk driver who crashed into a column of soldiers in the dark. “The only people who live well in this country are those who make decisions, sit on an [oil] pipe or those who guard it,” says Mr Pertsev.

The sorry state of villages like Semlevo is the result of “negative social selection”, says Ms Nefedova: the most active and able people have migrated to large towns. Few people have stayed behind, and most of those are unable to work. In Semlevo there is only one farmer who keeps his own sheep and chickens. Most houses there have no running water, plumbing or gas heating. Still, Semlevo's old collective farm is considered lucky: it was recently bought by a businesswoman from Moscow. Most other collective farms in this district are dead.

Russia's demography befits a country at war. The population of 142m is shrinking by 700,000 people a year. By 2050 it could be down to 100m. The death rate is double the average for developed countries. The life expectancy of Russian males, at just 60 years, is one of the lowest in the world. Only half of Russian boys now aged 16 can expect to live to 60, much the same as at the end of the 19th century.

No babies to kiss

“If this trend continues, the survival of the nation will be under threat,” Mr Putin said in his first state-of-the-nation address in 2000. Six years later he offered an increase in child support and a bonus for second babies. Since then the birth rate has started to climb, the number of deaths has declined and life expectancy has edged up a little (see chart 5). Mr Putin rejoiced: “We have overcome the trend of rising deaths and falling births…In the next three to four years we can stabilise the population figures.”

But demographers say there are few grounds for optimism, and Russia's goal of increasing the population to 145m is unattainable. Anatoly Vishnevsky, Russia's leading demographer, says an increase in the number of births in a single year does not reverse a trend. People may respond to financial incentives by changing their timing rather than having more babies overall. An extra $100 a month is helpful to people with low incomes and rural or Muslim families, who have more children anyway, but is unlikely to persuade middle-class families to produce more babies.

The main reason for the recent rise is that there was an uptick in the birth rate in the 1980s and the people born during that period are now having children themselves. But the next generation to reach child-bearing age is much smaller. “What we are going to see over the next few years is a rapid decline in the number of births,” says Mr Vishnevsky. At the same time the death rate is likely to go up, not because people will die any earlier but because the generation which is getting to the end of its life now is larger than the one born during the war.

Russia's demographic crisis is one of the main constraints on the country's economy. Although Russia's population has been ageing, over the past decade the country has enjoyed a “demographic dividend” because the age structure was in its favour. This dividend has now been exhausted and the population of working age will decline by about 1m a year, increasing the social burden on those that remain. Over the next seven years Russia's labour force will shrink by 8m, and by 2025 it may be 18m-19m down on the present figure of 90m.

What makes a shrinking population dangerous for a country that has always defined itself by its external borders is the loss of energy it entails, Mr Vishnevsky argues. The Soviet Union did not just try to exploit the resources of its vast and inhospitable land, it tried to populate it. Now large swathes of land in Siberia and the far east are emptying out as people move to central Russia. The population density in the country's far east is 1.1 people per square kilometre. On the other side of the border with China it is nearly 140 times that figure.

The decline in Russia's population is often linked to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, the pattern was set back in the mid-1960s when the number of births fell below replacement level and life expectancy started to shrink. In 1964, after several years of post-Stalin thaw, life expectancy for men was 65.1 years, only slightly lower than in the West. But by 1980 the gap with the West had widened to more than eight years and is now 15 years.

Russia's health problems, says Mr Vishnevsky, were partly a legacy of the cold war. By the middle of the 20th century the developed world had learnt to control infections that killed large numbers of people. The next targets were illnesses caused by lifestyle, such as heart attacks, pollution and respiratory diseases. But whereas the West invested heavily in health-care systems and better lifestyles, Russia was putting its financial and human capital into the arms race and industrialisation.

If life expectancy in Russia had improved at the same pace as in the West, the country would have had an extra 14.2m people between 1966 and 2000, adding 10% to the population. The Soviet Union's spending on health care was less than a quarter of the American figure. The Communist Party elite was well looked after, but ordinary people were less fortunate.

Crucially, the paternalistic Soviet system, which survives in today's Russia, was geared towards fighting epidemics and infections rather than to empowering people to look after their own health. Even now Russian doctors treat patients and their relatives like imbeciles. Officially the state guarantees free care for all, but half the patients offer gifts and money to doctors and the other half often have to forgo necessary treatment.

Boosting the country's health-care spending was one of the “national projects” Mr Medvedev was in charge of before becoming president. Last year its funding doubled to 143 billion roubles ($5.8 billion). That is still below Western standards, but the main problem is that it is not well spent. For example, the government more than doubled general practitioners' pay. But as Sergei Shishkin of the Independent Institute for Social Policy argues, the pay increase was not linked to performance and created a sense of injustice among specialists.

The curse of the bottle

Russian history, particularly in the 20th century, has encouraged the view that life is cheap. But there is also a strong self-destructive streak in the national character. Drinking yourself to death is one of the most widely used methods of suicide.

Alexander Nemtsov, a senior researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, points to a clear correlation between the death rate and the consumption of alcohol in Russia. A short anti-alcohol campaign conducted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s extended life expectancy by three years. Mr Nemtsov estimates that nearly 30% of all male deaths and 17% of female deaths are directly or indirectly caused by excess alcohol consumption and that over 400,000 people a year die needlessly from drink-related causes, ranging from heart disease to accidents, suicides and murders.

The average Russian gets through 15.2 litres of pure alcohol a year, twice as much as is thought to be compatible with good health. The problem lies not just with how much but also with what is drunk: moonshine and “dual-purpose” liquids, such as perfume and windscreen wash, make up a significant proportion of alcohol consumption, according to Russia's chief physician, Gennady Onishchenko. Tens of thousands a year die of alcohol poisoning, against a few hundred in America. In large cities the fear of losing a job, and growing car ownership, is keeping people soberer.

The most obvious reason why Russians drink so much is the low price and easy availability of alcohol. Consumption increased dramatically in the 1960s when the state hugely boosted production. People started drinking not just on special occasions but during the week and at work too.

Vodka is one of a very few Russian products that seem relatively immune to inflation. Between 1990 and 2005, for example, the food-price index increased almost four times faster than the alcohol-price index. A cheap bottle of vodka in Russia costs the same as two cans of beer or two litres of milk. The easiest way to curb consumption would be to make hard spirits much more expensive and less accessible, as many Nordic countries have done. But as with many other things in Russia, corruption gets in the way: two-thirds of hard liquor is produced illegally and sold untaxed.

Occasionally the government raises the alarm about alcohol poisoning, but it does little to curb drinking. Instead it has declared war on Georgian wine and mineral water, which it claims is not fit for consumption. But life expectancy in Georgia remains 12 years higher than in Russia.

Unlike drinking, AIDS is a relatively new problem for Russia. The first case of HIV was recorded in 1987, but it took a long time for the country to take notice. By 1997 the number of cases had grown to 7,000. Now the official figure is over 430,000, the largest in Europe. The real number could be double that, according to the World Health Organisation. Most victims are under the age of 30. Some two-thirds are drug-takers, but the epidemic is now spreading to the general public.

The government seems to have woken up to the danger and has increased spending. But Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the federal AIDS centre, says Russia still lacks adequate prevention measures.

About 28,000 people have already died of AIDS-related illnesses, but the real number could be masked by a co-infection of HIV and tuberculosis which kills people after two or three months. The incidence of TB is the highest in Europe. Last year 24,000 people died of the disease, almost 40 times as many as in America, not least because most TB hospitals are crumbling and some lack sewerage or running water.

The only solution to Russia's demographic problems appears to be immigration, as in the village of Semlevo, but the Russian public is hostile to it.

Wanted but not welcomed

Most low-skilled migrant workers in Russia come from Central Asia. In the east of the country they are mainly Chinese. The precise figures are impossible to pin down because the vast majority of immigrants over the past decade have been illegal. Until recently they were treated much like serfs. They could not apply for work permits but had to rely on their employers, who would often impound their passports and refuse to pay them for their work. Thousands of corrupt police officers grew fat on the proceeds.

Eyevine

A cheap way to oblivion

In the past couple of years the rules have become more accommodating and migrant workers can now apply for their own work permits and sign contracts with their employers. But for tax reasons only a quarter of immigrants do so. The new law has increased the number of legal migrants to more than 2m, but the real figure is thought to be five times that.

Many migrants are scared to venture outside on their own for fear of running into police or skinheads. Employers much prefer illegal immigrants to local workers because they are cheaper and will put up with worse conditions. But a xenophobic public habitually vents its anger on the immigrants, even though they are estimated to generate 8% of Russia's GDP.

Support for extremist organisations such as the Movement Against Illegal Immigration has risen sharply in the past few years. More than half the population supports the slogan “Russia for the Russians” and almost 40% feel “irritation, discomfort or fear” towards migrants from Central Asia and Azerbaijan. Hate crimes are on the rise. SOVA, a body that monitors racism, last year counted 667 racist attacks, including 86 racially motivated murders.

At a recent pep talk with the editors of Russia's leading media, Mr Putin urged them to guard against xenophobia. Russia's new day of unity is traditionally marked by ultra-nationalist marches, and the youth wing of Mr Putin's own United Russia party campaigns against immigrants. Dmitry Rogozin, a nationalist politician who built his campaign for parliament in 2003 on anti-immigrant rhetoric, is now Russia's ambassador to NATO. On his office wall hangs a portrait of Stalin.