Mark adomanis biography

MOSCOW — A blogger named Mark Adomanis has taken exception to my GlobalPost article on Russia's demographic crisis.
Adomanis claims that President Vladimir Putin's policies have allowed Russia to recover from its demographic crisis.
Mark A. Adomanis.

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A nation that is ‘both Ukrainian and Russian’

The following is a repost of an interview I did recently with the Kyiv Post’s Ilya Timtchenko on Ukraine’s relationship with Russia and the United States. I really like how it turned out.

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Dmitry Gorenburg is a lecturer at Harvard University, editor of Problems of Post-Communism and a senior analyst and director of Russian and East European Studies at CNA Strategic Studies, a non-profit think tank in Alexandria, Virginia. His is the author of Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation and a number of articles, including “Rethinking Interethnic Marriage in the Soviet Union.” In this Kyiv Post interview Gorenburg analyzes Ukraine’s relationship with Russia and the U.S. and gives advice for Ukraine’s nation-building.

Kyiv Post: What has prompted your interest in Eastern Europe?

Dmitry Gorenburg: I think much of it had to do with my personal biography. I was born in Russia and came to the U.S. when I was a kid. Since I was fluent in Russian and the Soviet Union was in the middle of perestroika, I got interes

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Russia’s shrinking population mars Putin’s superpower ambitions

Editor's note: This article is part of an ongoing series about how Vladimir Putin is attempting to remake Russia. Read previous articles about the "Eurasian Union" and efforts to regain Moscow's superpower status.

MOSCOW, Russia — Vladimir Putin is spinning a beguiling vision of Russia's future that could reshape global economic and military realities.

He imagines his country as the core of a mighty "Eurasian Union," a confederation of former Soviet states spanning two continents, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic.

"We suggest creating a powerful supra-national union capable of becoming a pole in the modern world, and at the same time an effective bridge between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific Region," Putin wrote in the Moscow daily Izvestia earlier this month.

But Putin's dream is hobbled by one big, inconvenient fact: Russia's population is shrinking dramatically.

More: Putin advances Eurasian Union

By mid-century there may not be enough workin

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Russia’s Dying: A Postscript

Over at Forbes, Mark Adomanis claims to have found eight errors in my piece on Michelle Parsons’ and Nicholas Eberstadt’s books on Russian demographics. To prove his points, he gets extremely selective with dates data—for example, he sets out to prove that my thesis (really, Eberstadt’s thesis) that Russia’s mortality rate fell after 1989 and still has not recovered, but he starts his graph in 1991—because if he started it in 1989, it would be plain that my assertion is true. I can go on and detail all the cherry-picking and misinterpretations in Adomanis’s piece, but the careful reader can easily do that herself. So I’ll concentrate on the substance of his criticism.

Adomanis claims that President Vladimir Putin’s policies have allowed Russia to recover from its demographic crisis. In essence, he is taking issue with a single phrase in my article: “In this study, published in 2010, Eberstadt accurately predicts that in the coming years the depopulation trend may be moderated but argue