Making Love

By Walter Kish

For the past month or so, large numbers of posters and billboards have been appearing all over Kyiv with a series of somewhat strange, though whimsical messages. The first one I saw caught me somewhat off guard. I was driving on the parkway that takes one from the center of Kyiv down to the Dnipro river, when there it was: on a billboard with a plain-coloured background were the words “Ukraine does not have enough football players – Make Love!”

There was no indication of who sponsored this curious exhortation, and at first I was not sure what exactly the message was supposed to mean, but it did elicit a chuckle from my companions.

A little further down the road we ran across another similar display, though this one read, “Ukraine does not have enough Nobel laureates – Make Love!” A bit further on we were greeted with the message: “Ukraine does not have enough Cosmonauts – Make Love!” Over the next few days, I saw many other similar examples and, finally, one that brought the message home quite directly – “We should be 52,000,000 – Make Love!”

Of course, this curious but effective ad campaign refers to one of Ukraine’s most pressing current social problems, namely the drastic decline in its population. When Ukraine became independent in 1991, its population stood at around 52,000,000. The latest government statistics put the population of Ukraine today at just over 47,000,000 people. Over the past fourteen years, Ukraine has shrunk by some five million souls, rather than growing by the seven million predicted by earlier projections.

The last time Ukraine experienced such a drastic population decline was due to the Second World War. After 1945, the population increased steadily, growing by about four or five million per decade until the 1990s. It plateaued in 1993 at just over fifty two million, and, since then, it’s been a steady downhill decline.

The reasons are plentiful. Since the iron curtain came down and Ukraine’s economy experienced what can only be called a collapse in the 1990s, millions of Ukrainians have left their country to find work, in primarily western Europe and Russia. The significant decline in employment, health care and the social support system also led to a serious increase in mortality rates, with the average lifespan of a typical Ukrainian male shrinking by some ten years, down to an average of 62.

Once-rare and controlled diseases such as tuberculosis have made a big comeback. The prevalence of alcoholism has increased, and Ukraine now has one of the highest HIV/AIDS growth rates in the world.

With economic prospects dim, it should also be no surprise that birth rates have plummeted, with few people wanting to have kids under such difficult conditions. From an annual rate of 15.2 births per thousand people in 1985, Ukraine’s birth rate has been almost halved, standing at 8.2 per thousand in 2005. The latest population trend analysis done by the UN indicates that at current rates, the population of Ukraine will shrink to about 35 million by the year 2030.

Needless to say, the government is getting increasingly concerned and is looking for ways to turn this disturbing trend around. It won’t admit to being behind the ad campaign I referred to earlier, but many people are speculating there was at least some “unofficial” involvement. On a more direct level, the government is offering an 8,000-hryvnia bonus to parents for every child born. This corresponds to almost two year’s salary for the average Ukrainian. This should give some indication of how serious it views this demographic time bomb.

Of course, the only effective long-term solution is to make Ukraine the kind of stable, economically strong and socially secure country that would encourage adult Ukrainians to stay in Ukraine and have families. That, needless to say, will take far more than an ad campaign and a hefty baby bonus to resolve, although the cheeky billboards have certainly livened up the drive to the airport!