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COMMENTS: Growing While Shrinking
As a follow-up to yesterday's obituaries for Boris Yeltsin, NBC assigned Jim Maceda to an In Depth examination of the state of the Russian economy in the wake of the transformation that Yeltsin introduced. Moscow is the "capital of glitz." A Muscovite couple from the "booming middle class" can be 15 times as affluent as their Soviet parents. As for Russia's elite, the country boasts more billionaires than any other nation except for the United States. Yet this economic health does not translate to the general population: male life expectancy is shorter than in Bangladesh; alcoholism, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis are spreading; and the population is shrinking at the annual rate of 700,000 people.
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