Billions of problems of billions people

With the world on the cusp of achieving a population of seven billion people, issues of demography are at the centre of discussions.

One particular report from Russia caught my attention. Russia's population is shrinking and will drop by a third by 2050: from 142 million people to 100 million.

It was Yuri Krupnov, Chairman of the Monitoring Council of the Russian Institute for demography, migration and regional development who revealed these figures.

In his piece published on BBC Russian, making some allowances for unforeseen circumstances, he spoke both about the causes and the consequences of that grim situation:

"One of the key factors is a combination of a 'European birth rate' (on average 1.5 children per woman) with an "African death rate", especially among the men of working age - with the male average life expectancy of just 63 according to the latest official data.

"Russia is the biggest country in the world by landmass, and the decline of its population will mean that large parts of the country risk being abandoned."

But the point which I would like to discuss is the mindset of a nation which faces such a rapid decrease in population.

What happens to the demography of Russia will be unsettling in terms of the national spirit.

Being the biggest country in the world by territory Russia has in parallel developed a sense of being a great nation too. And historically rightly so.

Look at its conquests, the wars it has won, its history of invention and discovery, its great literature, art - all of these achievements would justify such a feeling of pride.

However most of these accomplishments are increasingly confined to the past.

I follow the intellectual life of present-day Russia and see that this feeling of greatness is currently hanging in the balance between a glorious past and a mediocre reality of the present.

I have recently reviewed a compilation of modern Russian literary pieces and was amazed to discover that the common denominator in the theme for all the pieces in the book is the dysfunction between expectation and the reality.

This ubiquitous disfunctionality peppers literature with frustration; and this frustration translates into a telling mood on the national level.

Insecurities - as it's well known - are the fertile ground for aggression. I've seen it in behaviour of juvenile Taliban members; Russian literature tells the same story about the adolescent Bolshevism.

Xenophobia also has the same roots. Since this year has not yet ended, according to Sova, the centre for information and analysis, which monitors cases of xenophobia in Russia, in 2010 there were 436 registered cases of racial violence, including murder.

So every single day of the year someone is killed or severely beaten up in Russia just because he is from somewhere else.

In my novel Mbobo which tells the story of a mixed race boy born in Moscow in 1980 in the year of the Moscow Olympics, his two step-fathers discuss this issue:

'Good literature is literature you can't make a film out of'. Thus spoke drunk Gleb at Belarus Radial station, to which his conversant Nazar replied:

I answered bitterly: 'I'm a black Russian...'

Mr Krupnov says that Russia needs a demographic revolution to turn the unwanted tide of change and the key according to him is to encourage a higher birth rate in Russia.

But Mbobo's alternative is different - to redefine what it means to be a Russian.

Examples set bu America, India, Brazil and many other nations which are based on citizenship rather than ethnicity might help to find the answer to the challenges which Russians face.