OLGA wants her first baby, just delivered in the Siberian city
of Irkutsk, to have two siblings. Whether he will get them
depends on whether she and her husband can afford them. Yes, she
says, President Vladimir Putin's new plan to boost child
support, and pay a lump sum for second babies, might help.  Mr
Putin's aim is to boost Russia's birth rate, which plummeted
after the late Soviet period and has stabilised well below
replacement level. His ultimate goal is to arrest and reverse
Russia's headlong population decline. Despite a large influx of
ethnic Russians from elsewhere, the population has fallen by 6m
since the Soviet Union collapsed, to 143m. It is falling still,
by around 700,000 a year. There may be fewer than 100m Russians
left by 2050.  Olga's interest notwithstanding, Mr Putin's plan
is unlikely to halt the slide. That is partly because the trend
is an old and accelerating one. Money worries do not entirely
explain it: some of the poorest groups in Russia (most of them
Muslim) are the most ferti