Russia's unstoppable demographic decline

Despite Rosstat's classified data, several observers claim that Russia's population has now fallen below 140 million, with deaths consistently outnumbering births. The regions with traditionally higher growth rates are those with the highest number of casualties on the Ukrainian front.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Despite repeated appeals from President Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, urging young people to repopulate the countryside by starting large families in order to ‘live peacefully in our endless plains and build the Russia of the future’, the Russian population continues to decline rapidly, due to war and emigration, but also because people refuse to believe in the idyllic dreams proposed by the country's political and spiritual leaders.

The website Idel.Realii discussed the issue with two independent demographers, Salavat Abykalikov, a Tatar, and Aby Shukjurov, a Bashkir, who believe that the demographic crisis, which is also evident in the traditionally more prolific Tatar republics, has now become ‘systemic’.

Russian politician Sergei Mironov, leader of the “Fair Russia – For Truth” party, said that “every year, the equivalent of a large city disappears from Russia's demographic map”.

Even from the data of the statistical institute Rosstat for the last few years, which has now been classified, it can be deduced that in the last five years the population has fallen by almost two million, now almost below the threshold of 140 million, despite the fact that officially the figure of 145 million inhabitants continues to be cited.

According to statistics, 2024 was the first year in a very long time in which deaths exceeded births, 1.8 million compared to 1.2 million, and these figures will not be published for 2025.

The trend is set to worsen further, given the ever-increasing restrictions on immigration and the huge number of victims of the war, which shows no sign of ending and which saw an extreme military campaign in the summer with ever-increasing losses.

It is precisely the regions with traditionally higher growth rates, such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, that have suffered the highest number of casualties on the Ukrainian front, although these figures are even more difficult to verify and are obviously not included in any official statistics.

It is no coincidence that the Tatar Republic of Kazan is most open to the arrival of migrants, both from Central Asia and from other areas and regions of the Russian Federation itself, and that the Bashkir Republic of Ufa still has a slight prevalence of births over deaths.

Even in these regions, as in all others, the number of people fleeing abroad because of the war is unofficially estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, considering that many emigrate not permanently but return less and less frequently.

The number of marriages, on the other hand, seems to be bucking the trend: since the start of the special operation in Ukraine and the first large-scale mobilisations, people have begun to marry en masse, partly because of the economic advantages of war contracts, but this has not actually led to an increase in the birth rate and the much-desired “large families”.

The war has inspired a major propaganda campaign to increase births, seeking in every way to encourage pregnancies among young women and even minors, considering the under-25 generation to be crucial in reversing the negative demographic trend and securing the future.

Much also depends on the economic conditions of the various regions; Tatarstan has a highly developed oil industry, which allows it to maintain a larger population than poorer regions such as Buryatia, Tuva, Altai and North Ossetia, which have the worst demographic indicators in the whole of Russia, not to mention the gap between the capitals of Moscow and St Petersburg and the rest of the country.

One of the tools on which the Russian government bases its demographic policy is “maternal capital”, subsidies granted for second, third and subsequent children, which according to the programmes should guarantee “between 2 and 2.5 million births per year”.

In reality, according to experts, these measures at best encourage births in families that already intended to have more children, but do not lead to a real increase in the child population.

Now, many regions are also trying to introduce “abortion fines” in the hope of dissuading young women from terminating their pregnancies, but it is not with carrots and sticks that you can really increase people's lives and guarantee the future of a great country in decline.