Have you ever been to Moscow? I have, a couple of times. What I remember best are not the great landmarks. It is the duty-free at Domodedovo airport. West-European jewelry, luxury articles, clothes, wines, and spirits. Japanese and Korean electronics. Very posh. But practically nothing made in Russia itself. About the only exceptions are matroshkas, the painted wooden dolls that fit into each other, and vodka. Lots and lots of it.

There is nothing new about this. There was a time when, throughout the world, all non-agricultural products had to be manufactured by hand. Next, at some time in the seventeenth century, industry, driven first by water, then by steam, started taking over. Once this happened the Russians, for some obscure reason that has never been explained to my satisfaction, were no longer able keep up. Enlisting foreign experts, they succeeded in building up an arms industry. Its products were often crude, but they did the job. As, for example, the World War II Yak-9 fighter and T-34 tank did. And as the Kalashnikov assault rifle famously does to the present day.

The situation with non-military Russian industrial products the situation was just the opposite. Though serviceable, more or less, they tended to be crude. As a result, they never commanded much of a foreign market. Whoever has seen an item marked, “made in Russia”? Until 1917 at any rate the Russians enjoyed an agricultural surplus, mainly wheat, which they sold in Western Europe. Come Communism, though, and that trade disappeared. Not even the collapse of the Soviet Union could repair the damage. Currently Russian agricultural imports are four times as large as its exports. This, in spite of the fact that 9 percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture and fully 25 percent of the population lives on the land. Almost the only commodities Russia produces that foreigners want to buy are oil and gas. As someone has said, first the Soviet Union and then Russia turned into a “Saudi Arabia with an arms industry.”

In terms of its armed forces, the Soviet Union during the last two decades of its existence was probably the second most powerful country on earth. By some calculations it may have been the first. These forces fed on what, at the time, was supposed to be the second or third largest GDP. But things have changed. In terms of GDP Russia now ranks tenth in the world, behind not only the old-established industrial powers but China, Brazil, and India as well. However, its armed forces are still ranked as the second or, at worst, third most powerful. That is hardly a situation that can be sustained for very long.

Particularly enlightening is the comparison with China. Starting in the 17th century Russia, when dealing with China, always did so from a position of strength, enabling it to tear off and annex huge stretches of territory. This remained true even as late as the 1970s when the Chinese, perfectly aware of their weakness, prepared to meet a possible Soviet invasion by waging a “people’s war.” Since then, by contrast, so enormous has Chinese growth been, and so weak has Russia become, that the latter is in real danger of becoming a mere appendage to the former.

Worst of all is the demographic situation. Back in 1914 every tenth person on earth was governed from the Kremlin. Russia’s population exceeded that of the United States, let alone that of every European country. That is why people talked of “the Russian steamroller.” Even as late as 1990 just over one in twenty persons was Soviet and the Soviet population exceeded that of the US 270,000,000 to 240,000,000. Since then things have changed. Currently Russia’s population is just over 140,000,000, rather less than half that of the US. Only about one in fifty persons on earth is Russian.

Behind the decline are two World Wars in which Russia suffered greater casualties than any other country. Also, of course, Stalin’s purges which took the lives of millions, though probably not 20,000,000 as one author suggests. But there has also been at work another factor which, though it is mentioned much less often, may have been the most important of all, especially after 1945. What I mean is the Communist version of feminism.

The way Karl Marx’s friend Friedrich Engels, and, above all, the German Social-Democrat August Bebel saw it, no woman was truly free unless she worked outside the home and earned her own living. To this was added Lenin’s idea that the only way to pull the war- and revolution devastated Soviet Union of his day out of its misery was to have women work like men. Come Stalin, and millions of Russian women entered the factories (and the universities, where the Tsar did not admit them). Women drove tractors and trains. Women operated heavy mechanical equipment. Women did construction work and worked in the mines. During World War II the Soviet Union had the dubious distinction of being the only country in history where female workers formed a majority even among those employed underground. No wonder they died like flies. In return they got the rights of men and the wages of men (but only if they were as high as men in the hierarchy, which seldom happened. Neither of which, in a country like the Soviet Union, amounted to much.

The outcome was predictable. Early in the twentieth century the women of the Russian empire, 90 percent of whom lived in the countryside, were the most fertile in the world, having 6-8 children on the average. Though many children died, there still remained room for healthy demographic growth. With Lenin, Stalin and their female colleagues Nadezha Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife) and Alexandra Kollontai breathing down their necks, things changed. As women found employment outside the home, the birthrate dropped. The more so because of bad housing conditions in the cities which often forced families to share flats. The typical urban Soviet family became smaller and smaller until most counted just four persons: father, mother, child, and a live-in babushka.

The fact that contraceptives were hard to obtain and abortion the most important method of birth control only made things worse. The downward trend was not evenly distributed. Partly because they were less urbanized, partly because of social and cultural factors, the decline among the empire’s non-Slav populations was much smaller than among the ethnic Russians. By the 1980s, well over one third of the Soviet population consisted of Moslems. Finally realizing what they had done, the authorities started paddling back. Some changes were made to make the lives of working women easier. Party hacks suddenly discovered the virtues of the “traditional” Russian kitchen as a place to relax, socialize, and gossip. Too little, too late. When the War in Afghanistan essentially left the Kremlin without an army able and willing to enforce its wishes the endgame, in the form of Soviet disintegration, got under way.

Today Putin, commanding armed forces that he has succeeded in modernizing during the last fifteen years, is trying to show that his country is still a world power. A part of this effort he has stirred up trouble in the Ukraine and the Middle East (though whether his support of Assad is really more ill-advised than Obama’s attempts to topple the Syrian president is moot). He has even succeeded in raising the birth rate a little bit. But there still can be no question of reversing the overall demographic decline. Let alone of addressing the most important problem of all, i.e Russia’s chronic inability to produce industrial goods anyone wants to buy.

By all historical logic Russia, or the Russian Federation as it pleases to call itself, is doomed. The disintegration may well start with the thirty percent of the population who are not Russian. Against this historical trend, not even Putin’s attempts to shore up his country by flexing its military muscle is likely to be of much avail.