RIA Novosti reports that Vladimir Sokolin, head of Russia's Federal Statistics Service, stated last Thursday that "the age of retirement should be raised, arguing it would prolong life expectancy in the country, which is facing a severe demographic crisis." He noted that "Russia is one of the three [post-Soviet] countries, including Belarus and Ukraine, which has not changed its retirement age" and said: "I believe raising the age of retirement is inevitable. I do not know when we will launch the reform, but this will probably have to be done."

The retirement age in Russia today is 60 for men and 55 for women. The average life expectancy among men in the country was 57 years, compared with 60-65 years in Soviet times.

In other words, raising the age to qualify for pensions for men even a little will mean that the men will not live long enough to collect it. Who is Sokolin trying to kid with this insane bit of Neo-Soviet logic? Clearly, the Russian government is running out of cash to pay pensions and wants to eliminate them, but to argue that doing so will INCREASE THE LIFESPAN of Russians is clearly insane, and the report doesn't contain a hint of explanation as to how this could be so.

There was more drunken insanity from Sokolin: He claimed that Russia's falling birthrate (it dropped by 5,000 to 715,000 in the first half of 2006 according to Sokolin) was "partly due to women's increasingly important role in society and business, a trend also shared by many developed countries." One would be hard-pressed indeed to show that Russian woman have made recent strides into "soci