Window on Eurasia

Russia Will Soon Disappear From the Map, German Filmmaker Says

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 4, 2006 – A German filmmaker has predicted that Russia will soon disappear from the map of the world, the victim of demographic change – declining ethnic Russian population and rising Muslim population -- and international competition for access to its natural resources.

Not surprisngly, Peter Scholl-Latour’s 45-minute film, which was
shown on Germany’s ZDF channel last week, has sparked outrage among
Russians, as has the book the 80-year-old director wrote after a 2005
visit to Russia that served as the basis for his television show

[http://newsru.com/russia/03jul2006/russia.html].

The film, entitled “Russia in a Double Bind,” advances the argument
that however well-positioned Russia appears to be today on the basis of
its earnings from the export of gas, oil, and other natural resources,
it is doomed to inevitable collapse by a combination of what
Scholl-Latour calls “objective circumstances.”

“The number of ethnic Russians is rapidly declining,” he says in
the film, “while the number of non-Russians (chiefly of Muslim peoples)
is rapidly growing.” And the resulting depopulation of Russia’s Far
East means, he continues, that those territories will “fall into the
hands of China like a ripe fruit, without a single shot being fired.

More serious and more dangerous, he predicts, will be the course of
events elsewhere in the Russian Federation. There, Scholl-Latour
argues, there is likely to be a military confrontation among the West, China,
and the Islamic world for control over the resources on the territory
of what is now the Russian Federation.

Such military conflict, he concludes, is far more likely than any over
China or Iran, however likely the last may appear to some observers
now. And consequently, Russia’s enormous natural wealth, given its
political and military weakness, may prove to be a nail in its coffin
rather than the foundation for its future success.

Following a report about the film by susanin.ru on Sunday, other
Russian news agencies and newspapers including “Novaya politika” on Monday
reacted with a combination of skepticism and outrage to the suggestion
by a German filmmaker that Russia was about to disappear.

But even as they did so, many of them used Scholl-Latour’s argument
that the Russian Federation faces a disastrous demographic future as
the occasion to express their support for President Vladimir Putin’s call
for deploying additional resources to reverse these unfavorable
demographic trends.

More interestingly, some websites based in Turkic and Muslim areas –
and especially KavkazTsentr – cast their reporting in terms that
suggested a certain Schadenfreude about the Russian Federation’s
difficulties as described by Scholl-Latour’s film.

In the immediate aftermath of the end of the Soviet Union, many writers
in the Russian Federation and the West speculated that Russia would
disintegrate just as the USSR had. But in the first six years of
Putin’s presidency, few people anywhere were prepared to make such
predictions.

Now, such projections are once again being made in both Russia and the
West, but just as was the case 15 years ago, the suggestion that Russia
will disappear from the map of the world that Scholl-Latour’s film
suggests is almost certainly overblown and at the very least is
seriously premature.

Nonetheless, the appearance of this film and especially Russian anger
about it suggests that underlying problems that many assumed Boris
Yeltsin was incapable of addressing remain very much alive, something
Putin and his supporters are unwilling to acknowledge, especially when
they are raised by a German filmmaker.