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Russia is paying the cost of the 90s

Written by ABC AUDIO on October 27, 2022

With a slumping birth rate, a death rate on the rise and immigration slowly falling, Russia is experiencing population decline. Despite having launched some of the most encouraging childbirth policies, Putin is now facing a major problem for someone who believes population is synonymous with power, says French demographer Laurent Chalard.

Russia’s population has been declining at a dizzying rate for the past 30 years. The demographic trend has been steadfast since 1991, when the Soviet Union fell and Russia counted 148.2 million inhabitants within its far-reaching borders. By 2021, that number had fallen to 146.1 million, according to Russian statistics agency Rosstat. What’s even more striking is that, according to demographic projections, the country’s population will continue to fall and reach between 130 and 140 million inhabitants by 2050.

“Russia is paying the cost of the 90s,” explains Alain Blum, a demographer at the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) in France. “When the Soviet Union fell, the country plunged into a serious demographic crisis. For the first time, Russia’s mortality rate significantly exceeded its birth rate, leading to a decline in its population.” By the early 2000s, Russia had a population of only 143 million.

“Today, people of childbearing age are those who were born during that period, and there simply aren’t enough of them to drive population growth,” the researcher explains. Especially given that Russia is also facing an increased mortality rate at the moment as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Childbirth policies and migration
But that’s not to say that President Vladimir Putin, who came to power in 2000, hasn’t made efforts to curb the trend. In addition to modernising hospitals and improving healthcare options, he also launched a major set of childbirth policies. “Russia has become one of the most encouraging countries in this regard,” Chalard, who specialises in population movements, points out.

“In recent years, the government has set up financial aid programmes for parents, family allowance systems, bonuses for large families…” Chalard recounts. “Not to mention very active propaganda around the issue. Putin himself regularly advocates for family values and calls on the population to have kids in his public speeches.”

At the same time, Putin has pursued a vast migration policy by opening Russian borders to immigrant workers who often come from Central Asia, facilitating naturalisation procedures for Russian speakers and giving out Russian passports to inhabitants of neighbouring countries. But these migratory movements were stopped dead in their tracks due to Covid-19.

“Putin is obsessed with this demographic issue,” says Chalard. “In his mind, the power of a country is linked to the size of its population. The larger the population, the more powerful the state.”

Following this mindset, Putin presented the demographic crisis as a “historic challenge” in January 2020, and assured his country that “Russia’s destiny and its historic prospects depend on how numerous we will be”.

In the face of this, population decline is clearly a key motivator for Russia in its war against Ukraine, Chalard and Blum agree. Ukraine has a population of 44 million people who are mostly of Slavic descent from the former Soviet bloc. For Putin, the invasion is not only about capturing territory he believes belongs to Russia, but about gaining control over a population he wants to “integrate” into the country.

In its latest population census, Moscow has included the 2.4 million inhabitants of the Donbas, parts of which were administered by pro-Russia separatists before the current invasion. For several weeks now, the Kremlin has also decided to refocus its efforts in the east of Ukraine with one objective in mind: organising local referendums on potential integration into Russia.

Consequences of the war in Ukraine
But could Putin’s ambition to boost population growth backfire and, conversely, worsen the demographic crisis?

“If I take Ukrainian sources into account, Russia has sent 165,000 soldiers into Ukraine. That’s nothing compared to the total population, meaning deaths from the war will have a very small impact on Russian demography,” says Chalard. “Unless the situation turns into a global conflict and forces Russia to increase its troop deployment considerably.”

Russia’s natural population has undergone its largest peacetime decline in recorded history over the last 12 months, according to an analysis of official government statistics made by a prominent independent demographer, as the country battles a deadly fourth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The natural population, a number calculated from registered deaths and births, excluding the impact of migration, declined by 997,000 between October 2020 and September 2021, the demographer Alexei Raksha has calculated.

Russia has been one of the countries hit hardest by the pandemic, registering at least 660,000 excess deaths since the start of 2020, according to government data, and the dramatic drop appears to show the devastating toll the pandemic has had on the country’s social fabric.

Previous government reports showed Russia’s population decline in 2020 was 11 times greater than that of the pre-pandemic 2019.

“It’s pretty simple, the deaths caused by Covid-19 are the biggest reason for the decline witnessed. Most other factors have stayed the same,” said Raksha, a demographic forecaster who left Russia’s state agency Rosstat last year after criticising the information centre’s coronavirus figures.

He pointed out that birth rates had not decreased over the last year, which indicated the decline was due to Russia’s increased death rate.

Despite widely available vaccines, Russia on Wednesday recorded a new record number of coronavirus deaths, as Russians continue to be sceptical of the Russian-made vaccines, with only a third of the population fully vaccinated.

“I don’t see how the situation can improve given the current trajectory of vaccine hesitancy and a lack of restrictions,” Raksha added.

Raksha said the current demographic decline could be compared to the decline seen between July 1999 and June 2000, when Russia’s population fell by 983,000, following a decade of economic instability, which caused birth rates and life expectancy to crash.

Russia’s population drop was already at the forefront of the Kremlin’s agenda before the pandemic and experts say Covid-19 only further exacerbates the issue.

Russia’s total population of about 145 million is lower than it was when Vladimir Putin first came to power in 2000.

The Russian president admitted in his 2019 annual press conference that the prospect of a depopulating Russia “haunted” him. Reversing the demographic crisis by the end of his term in 2024 was one of the key pledges announced during his 2018 re-election campaign.

The Kremlin has over the years introduced a number of policies and welfare payments to boost the decreasing birth rate, including schemes that give generous payouts to families with more than two children.

Despite its effort, however, a 2019 government report said Russia’s population could drop by more than 12 million by 2035.

Kremlin critics say the government has also used the demographic crisis to justify its clampdown on the LGBT community, introducing banning “gay propaganda” and outlawing adoption for same-sex couples in an effort to promote so-called traditional family values.

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