The Guardian: "Vladimir Putin pledges to spend £32bn on increasing Russian life expectancy"
Vladimir Putin has promised to spend £32.5bn on increasing life expectancy and boosting Russia's flagging birthrate by up to 30% in the next four years.
The prime minister made the pledge in a bold address to parliament on Wednesday in which he appeared to make a play for his return to the presidency.
During his two-and-a-half-hour annual speech to the state duma, Putin boasted of the country's economic recovery and promised rapid military expansion while announcing many populist measures aimed at elderly and provincial voters.
Russia will hold parliamentary elections in December and a presidential poll next spring, so the address was watched closely for signs that Putin wants to recover the job he held from 2000 to 2008.
Analysts noticed the prime minister made little mention of President Dmitry Medvedev, the close political ally whom Putin endorsed as his successor, but who has recently hinted he may not be keen to give way to his mentor.
Instead, Putin employed his traditional statist rhetoric to promote a strong, confident Russia, able to see off its enemies but unfettered by democratic change.
"This country requires decades of steady, uninterrupted development," he said. "Without sharp changes in course or ill-thought through experiments based so often in either unjustified liberalism, or on the other hand, social demagogy."
Putin said 1.5 trillion roubles (£32.5bn) had been allocated to "demographic projects" which would increase the birthrate (as measured in 2006) by 25-30% by 2015, and boost average life expectancy from the current 69 years to 71 in the same period.
Preliminary results of a nationwide census taken last year showed that since the last figures were taken in 2002 Russia's population has fallen by 2.2 million to just under 143 million as a result of low fertility and a high mortality rate among men.
It was unclear exactly what "projects" Putin had in mind to stimulate the birthrate but Russia makes cash payments to mothers when their children are born and other more imaginative measures have been used.
In September 2007, the city of Ulyanovsk organised a day of conception, when workers were encouraged to go home and have sex.
Prizes including a 4x4 car were given to those who gave birth on 12 June, Russia Day, the following year.
Putin indicated that fertility was already on the rise. "The main thing is to keep up the tempo," he said. Modernisation of healthcare would lead to greater longevity, he added.
Tom Parfitt
