RUSSIANS TAKE STEPS TO OFFSET THEIR LOW BIRTH RATE

• Published in: The Boston globe
• Main Author: Patrick Oster Chicago Sun-Times
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston, Mass Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC 11.12.1983
• ISSN: 0743-1791

A low birth rate has already brought Russians to just above 50 percent of the 272 million Soviet citizens, according to the last census. That continued rate, coupled with an explosive birth rate among Soviet Moslems here in Central Asia, will make Russians technically a minority group. In fact, according to one emigre demographer, Mikhail S. Bernstam, Russians may already be in the minority - 49.9 percent - if one excludes those who call themselves Russian because of education but who come from non-Russian stock. In fact, the Soviet Union "is almost the only state which after World War II has been able to thwart the successful global trend of national and ethnic self-assertiveness against central authority," according to Columbia University Soviet specialist Seweryn Bialer. No one expects an internal revolt - not even from the country's millions of Moslems, who live within range of radio broadcasts from radical Islamic Iran. But Bialer adds: "The multinational character of the Soviet Union poses potentially the most serious threat to the legitimacy of the Soviet state and to the stability of the Soviet regime." V.I. Lenin himself, founder of the Soviet state, spent a great deal of time formulating a nationalities policy, which he rooted in equal national treatment and the right of any republic to secede from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as the country is formally known. At least that's the way it's supposed to work on paper. In practice, the friction among the Soviet people has been substantial.