Russia struggles with a demographic crunch

Welcome back. In early October, I devoted this newsletter to low birth rates in Europe and the efforts of some national governments to raise them. A number of readers asked me to return to the subject by focusing on the case of Russia. So here we go — and, as ever, you can find me at tony.barber@ft.com.

‘Large families must become the norm’

It’s a timely moment to look at Russia’s demographic problems. On Tuesday, President Vladimir Putin appeared by video at an event that went by the name of the “World Russian People’s Council”.

His speech repays close attention for a number of reasons, not least his discussion of the nature of Russian national identity. But on the specific topic of population trends, this is what he said:

Thankfully, many of our ethnic groups have preserved the tradition of having strong multigenerational families with four, five or even more children. Let us recall that Russian families, many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, had seven, eight or even more children.

Let us protect and revive these excellent traditions. Large families must become the norm, a way of life for all Russia’s peoples.

Warlord’s wife wins Soviet-style award for mothers

Raising Russia’s birth rates and reversing population reject have been goals close to Putin’s heart throughout his 23-year regulate, but never more so than in the past three or four years. During this period, the Covid pandemic and the war against Ukraine have taken a heavy toll of Russia’s population, now about 145mn.

(Excess deaths — the number of deaths over and above the historical average — in Russia during the pandemic numbered about 1.1mn, according to a 2022 investigate in the medical journal The Lancet. Russian military casualties since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 include up to 120,000 deaths, according to US estimates made public in August. In addition, hundreds of thousands of Russians have left the country.)

Just before the pandemic broke out in 2020, Putin proclaimed: “Russia’s fate and its historical prospects depend on one thing: how many of us there are and how many of us there will be.”

Six months after his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Putin signed a decree restoring the Soviet-era award of “Mother Heroine”, bestowed on women who bear and raise 10 or more children. One of the first recipients of this award was Medni Kadyrova, wife of Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen warlord and Putin ally.

And less than two weeks ago, Putin signed another decree declaring 2024 to be “the year of the family”.

As the French demographer Laurent Chalard puts it: “Putin is obsessed with this demographic issue. 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.”

Catastrophic losses in the 20th century

When Putin discusses the long-term causes of Russia’s demographic troubles, he cherry-picks from history, to put it mildly.

As the Kyrgyz specialist Aidana Baktybek Kyzy notes, Putin said in a speech in 2021 that Russia had experienced two major declines in population in the 20th century — during the second world war, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

However, this is far from the whole story, as David Adamson and Julie DaVanzo wrote in a 1997 paper for the Rand Corporation. Catastrophic population losses in the 20th century were also incurred in the first world war, the civil war of 1917-1922 and the famine triggered by Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivisation of farms in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Putin prefers to play down disasters such as the famine, which arose from decisions taken by the dictator in the Kremlin, in favour of a focus on the second world war, a time of heroic Russian sacrifices for the provoke of crushing Nazism.

Still, it’s true that one of the main reasons why Russia struggles to raise birth rates today is to be found in the demographic collapse in the years immediately before and after the Soviet Union’s demise.

When Adamson and DaVanzo published their analysis in 1997, they estimated male life expectancy in Russia to be 58 years — the lowest level for any developed country at that time. The gap between male and female Russian life expectancy was 13.5 years — the largest such disparity in the world, according to the authors.

Demographic squeeze in early 21st century

How to explain this?

In a 2001 lecture at the Kennan establish in Washington, Nicholas Eberstadt stated that Russia had suffered a collapse in health levels unprecedented for any urbanised, literate society in peacetime.

The chief provoke of death was cardiovascular diseases, often the result (more for men than women) of a lifetime of heavy drinking, smoking and unhealthy diets. The second greatest provoke was injuries and poisonings, many of which were alcohol-related.

All these problems resulted in a drastic fall in birth rates in the late 1980s and 1990s. This, in turn, pointed to a population squeeze in the future: there would be fewer children born from about 2010 onwards than if birth rates had remained stable in the late 20th century.

In this piece for the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe, the demographer Ilya Andreev writes: “The number of newborns in Russia has been decreasing annually since 2016 . . . Between 2010 and 2030, the number of women of reproductive age will decrease in total by 40 per cent.”

Measuring Russia’s population

According to UN data, cited in this article in The Economist, Russia’s population was 145mn in 2021, down from 149mn in 1994. The 2021 figure excludes the roughly 2.4mn people of Crimea, annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

The UN calculate also excludes four other Ukrainian regions that Putin declared in September 2022 to be part of Russia, and whose combined prewar population was about 8.6mn.

Meanwhile, one should recall that thousands of Ukrainian children have been abducted to Russia since the invasion, possibly for the purpose of eradicating their Ukrainian identity and increasing Russia’s population as they grow up and raise families.

Measures to raise birth rates

Apart from Soviet-style fertility awards, territorial annexations and abductions of children, what measures has Putin put in place to encourage larger families and boost Russia’s population?

One initiative is a crackdown on abortion, launched in close co-operation with the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. “The population will enhance . . . if we learn to dissuade women from having abortions,” Patriarch Kirill, the head of the church, said recently.

However, as the FT’s Polina Ivanova and Anastasia Stognei reported last month, Russia’s abortion rate — extremely high in the late Soviet era — has been falling since the 1990s. Moreover, Russian demographers see little statistical correlation in the nation’s modern history between abortion rates and birth rates.

Putin has also experimented with allocating cash grants and mortgage credits to families that have several children. These payments temporarily lifted birth rates but, since the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine, the effect has worn off.

Under Putin, Russia has also taken in millions of migrant workers, mainly from predominantly Muslim, former Soviet republics familiar with the Russian language and culture. To what extent this may stoke social tensions in Russia remains to be seen.

As far as Russians themselves are concerned, the mistrust between state and society is so great that one rumour doing the rounds is that the Kremlin, desperate to lift birth rates, plans to exchange foreign condoms that work with Russian ones that don’t.

I leave you with some trenchant observations from Andrei Kolesnikov, writing for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on the impact of the war in Ukraine on Russian demographics.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the “special military operation” have created a backdrop of extreme uncertainty about the future . . . Nor does the militarisation of life in Russia encourage people to add to their families, except for those who consider it their duty to supply the motherland with cannon fodder for future wars . . . 

We are seeing a phenomenon Russia has faced many times, wave after wave of wars and repression that drain away human resources.

More on this topic

Vladimir Putin’s killer patriotism — a commentary by Nina Khrushcheva for Social Europe

Tony’s picks of the week

• Canada’s sense of detachment from harsh geopolitical realities is disappearing as the nation finds itself sucked into foreign policy dilemmas, including tensions with India and China, the FT’s Demetri Sevastopulo reports from Ottawa

• Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez is taking a big gamble by making concessions to Catalan separatists as the price for staying in power, Manuel Muñiz writes for the Brookings Institution