New Yorker: Article on Depopulation and AIDS

Wed Oct 13 15:38:46 UTC 2004

Personally, I got a kick out of Specter's translation of the expression "poryadochny chelovek." A man of order and discipline??? Couldn't resist and e-mailed the NY-er people about that last week.

Victoria Sevastianova
Dartmouth College

--- You wrote:
Dear Colleagues!

I wonder if anyone else had the same reaction to this week's New Yorker article on AIDS and depopulation in Russia (I've appended it in two installments because of length limits). 

I've always thought of the New Yorker as the premier news magazine for accurate and insightful news stories. Specter's article, though, is third-rate and full of gross inaccuracies, exaggerations, and false synecdoches. 

For instance, Russia is either equated or compared negatively to: Bangladesh, Pakistan, Yemen, Africa as a whole, Kenya, China, India, and Turkey. Perhaps the most ridiculous claim in the article is that before World War II, Russia was a "third-world nation." Does the author know what it's like in a third-world country? Does the author know anything about the history of Russia in the twentieth century? 

The population estimates offered in the article portray the most pessimistic forecasts as the "best case scenario." The crazy statistic of 80 million people is from Sergei Yermakov, of the Research Public Health Institute (no citation in the article, of course, for the source, but I've followed the demographic debate closely over the last few years). However, Yermakov's statistics are generally viewed as unsupportable by most serious demographers in Russia and the US. 

The claim that HIV is not covered in the Russian press is also ludicrous -- Kommersant ran an excellent series of very long features on the AIDS epidemic in May of this year -- not exactly a progressive, anti-governmental, or alarmist newspaper. 

We read about surgeons using hotplates for sterilizers -- as though that were true in all hospitals in Russia. And the rumor (which I've never seen substantiated in the Russian press) of soldiers begging for bullets at Beslan, as though that were true of the Russian military in general. Would it be accurate to claim that the US military is underfunded and incompetent based on stories of soldiers buying body armor on eBay? There's limited truth in such synecdoches, but to infer from the author's isolated experiences and random readings that these facts hold true generally is an example of what good journalists DO NOT do. 

What's clear to anyone who's lived, worked, and spoken with Russians is that the article is written by someone with very limited and naïve knowledge of how things actually work in Russia - remarkable in a magazine whose editor in chief is David Remnick. >From the first sentence on, Russia is portrayed as some exotic, backwards, "oriental" place. Foolishness.

Best,

mad

()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()
Dr. Michael A. Denner
Russian Studies Program
Director, Honors Program
Stetson University
Campus Box 8361
DeLand, FL 32724
386.822.7381 (department)
386.822.7265 (direct line)
386.822.7380 (fax)
http://www.stetson.edu/~mdenner

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