Russia is not going in a good direction, people. A scary brand of religious fanaticism is promoted by the government that refuses to respect its citizens in any significant way and offers religious hysteria as compensation for depriving people of their most basic rights. The results of the so-called democratic elections are falsified and everybody knows it. (Everybody, that is, except American journalists who keep screeching about “democracy in Russia”, as if it weren’t the greatest joke of the recent decades.) The country produces nothing and only manages to keep afloat by exporting oil. My readers are an intellectual bunch, so I won’t explain why an economy that is tied to a single natural resource is hopeless.

Russia’s official ideology is profoundly racist. There is a widespread hysteria around the supposedly imminent extinction of the white people and the terrifying spread of the brown folks of scary and barbaric ethnicities. The Russians seem to have forgotten that only seventy years ago, Hitler was planning to exterminate all Slavs as an inferior, barbaric race. The so-called “demographic crisis” is discussed in the Russian media in such dramatic ways that you’d think the planet was on the brink of extinction as a result of depopulation (rather than the opposite.)

The Russian authorities are worried that the Russian women don’t procreate enough to make up for the advent of the brown people*. So they do all they can to force women into procreating. A while ago, I reported on the ridiculous campaign that attempted to shame women into having more children. As was to be expected, this was immediately followed by an assault on women’s reproductive freedoms. A piece of legislation is now being pushed through Duma (the Russian joke of a Parliament) that will impose waiting periods women have to submit to before getting an abortion and that will allow doctors to refuse to perform abortions on religious grounds**.

During the waiting period, a psychologist and a social worker will persecute women who seek abortions, telling them ridiculous fairy-tales about how they will be psychologically damaged for life if they refuse to have an unwanted child. This is a very poor country, mind you. Just think about how dedicated its government must be to the cause of stripping women of their reproductive freedoms if it’s willing to waste money on psychologists and social workers whose only job will be to hound women who request abortions.

Even though the healthcare system in Russia is free, abortions are now to be excluded from the list of free services. As a result, rich women will be able to be in control of when and whether they give birth, while indigent women (of whom Russia boasts staggering numbers) will be forced to procreate or seek clandestine, dangerous abortions.

There are millions upon millions of orphans in Russia. These children live in horrible conditions. Some are kept in orphanages that are so bad it would break your heart to see what they look from the inside and to hear what the poor kids kept there have to go through. As a result, many kids run away. They become homeless and are exploited in all kinds of ways by adult criminals.

The government that has done nothing to help these kids is now forcing indigent women to bring even more unwanted miserable babies into the world.

If this sounds completely nuts, I want to remind you that Russia imposes an obligatory period of military service on all its young males. Except, of course, the rich ones who can pay a bribe and get out of the military service obligations.

*If you are shocked by the rhetoric, that’s good. On my blog, at least, you’ll hear the actual terminology that is used in Russia to discuss these issues. The mainstream media in the US are so dedicated to promoting the myth of the democratic Russia that you don’t get to hear the truth from them.

** In the context of Russian history, this is the funniest thing anybody could suggest. After decades of complete and utter atheism during the Soviet era, people who are of the age that allows them to be doctors cannot possibly be religious in Russia today.