Time Immortal

When Mark Steyn talks of the importance of reversing the death-spiral demographic trends in places like Russia (which has a dismally low birthrate and a male life expectancy approaching that of Yemen), I somehow get the feeling that he doesn’t have this in mind, exactly.

Remember the mammoths, say the clean-cut organisers at the youth camp’s mass wedding. “They became extinct because they did not have enough sex. That must not happen to Russia”.

Obediently, couples move to a special section of dormitory tents arranged in a heart-shape and called the Love Oasis, where they can start procreating for the motherland.

With its relentlessly upbeat tone, bizarre ideas and tight control, it sounds like a weird indoctrination session for a phoney religious cult.

But this organisation - known as “Nashi”, meaning “Ours” - is youth movement run by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin that has become a central part of Russian political life.

Nashi’s annual camp, 200 miles outside Moscow, is attended by 10,000 uniformed youngsters and involves two weeks of lectures and physical fitness.

Attendance is monitored via compulsory electronic badges and anyone who misses three events is expelled. So are drinkers; alcohol is banned. But sex is encouraged, and condoms are nowhere on sale.

Bizarrely, young women are encouraged to hand in thongs and other skimpy underwear - supposedly a cause of sterility - and given more wholesome and substantial undergarments.

Twenty-five couples marry at the start of the camp’s first week and ten more at the start of the second. These mass weddings, the ultimate expression of devotion to the motherland, are legal and conducted by a civil official.

Attempting to raise Russia’s dismally low birthrate even by eccentric-seeming means might be understandable. Certainly, the country’s demographic outlook is dire. The hard-drinking, hardsmoking and disease-ridden population is set to plunge by a million a year in the next decade.

It gets creepier from there — I guess the Russians never really let go of all the old Soviet ways. One notes that this sort of silliness, as Chesterton observes occasionally from this blog’s sidebar, that should be expected when a nation abandons God wholescale; the result is not liberation, clarity, or reason…in fact the result is nothing but the deification of the state, the execution of the will of which rapidly takes on religious overtones of its own.

You know, though, this whole thing could probably have been avoided had the nation simply cloven to its Orthodox and Catholic religious roots even through the dark times of Communist rule. Or, you know, at least retained traditional Christian moral inclinations where sexuality and procreation are concerned. The Russians embraced the secular view of such things with gusto, and now they wonder where the hell their birthrate has gone. Perhaps they should have thought that through before they allowed the abortion rate to reach a level of nearly 70% of all pregnancies per anum.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Zippy Catholic)