Numbers don’t lie: How Russia is battling a crippling demographic decline

“Demography is destiny,” said French philosopher Auguste Comte nearly two centuries ago. In 2020, Vladimir Putin made a similar observation, “Russia’s fate and its historical outlook depend on how many of us there are”.

If so, Russia might be in serious trouble.

The world’s biggest country by landmass, Russia has been depopulating in recent decades, presenting a growing dilemma for a nation with one of the world’s largest militaries which is engaged in a meatgrinder of a battle with its western neighbour Ukraine.

Russia has dealt with this dilemma since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since 1994, when the Russian population was about 148m people, the country’s demographics have lost nearly five million people, reducing to 143m in 2021. Compared to Russia, the US gained almost 70 million people in the same period.

The Russian federal statistics service (Rosstat), however, says the country’s population jumped to 146.5m in 2023 after Moscow gave citizenship to people of Russian ethnicities in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

Despite the recent spike, the projected numbers present a worrying scenario for policy-makers in the Kremlin.

Russia has the ninth biggest population now, but by 2050, it will decline to the 17th most populous state, according to estimates.

The Russian population has merely increased by about ten million people since 1900, when the Russian Empire covered present-day Poland and the Baltic states.

Comparatively, the US – not a global power back then – had a population of 76m people in the same year. The US population today stands at 332m, a more than four-time increase since 1900.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union – which had a population of around 288.6 million in 1990 – the newly-emerged Russian Federation represented barely half of the communist state’s demographics in 1991, as many non-Russian republics from Turkic Central Asia to the European Baltics gained independence from Moscow.

This grim fact made Russian President Vladimir Putin observe during his State of the Union address in 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” and “a genuine tragedy” for the Russian people.

Though the newly-independent non-Russian states might disagree with this idea of a Russian tragedy, many analysts see Putin’s political approach to the Soviet collapse and NATO’s enlargement across Eastern Europe as one of the main motivations for launching the military offensive against Ukraine last year.

‘Well below replacement level’

But as the Ukraine conflict drags, Russia has had to grapple with another harsh reality – more population decrease, either as battlefield casualties and also due to largescale migration by civilians keen to avoid drafting into the military or other consequences of Russia’s “special military operation”.

Experts say the new trends are adding to the number-pressure in the country.

“Russia's total fertility rate has been in decline for a long time. The Russian fertility rate is well below what we universally call the replacement level of 2.1,” says Mehmet Fatih Aysan, a professor of sociology at Marmara University, where he leads the Center for Population and Social Policies.

Replacement level refers to the average number of children born per woman, ensuring the replacement of parents by their kids from one generation to the next. In order to replace the father and mother, at least two kids are required, which will keep the population level stable. The additional 0.1 refers to the possibility that kids might not reach their marriage age for various reasons or might not get married, Aysan tells TRT World.

The Russian fertility rate reached its lowest point of 1.2 in 1998, a turbulent year when the country faced a serious currency crisis. Through the 1990s, various factors – ranging from a large number of abortions to a low birth rate combined with a high death level and decreased life expectancy – contributed to the Russian demographic decline.

“Russia has gone through a demographic transition in which its population has aged, as both its birth and death rates are slowing down, corresponding to a situation we call the Stage 3,” says Aysan.

But under Putin, a strong advocate of pronatalist and pro-family policies, Russia has offered incentives to stimulate the birth rate, leading to the country’s fertility rate growing to the current level of 1.6.

While population decline is not only Moscow’s problem in a post-modern world, it might have more lethal consequences for countries like Russia, which receive very limited migrants compared to Western countries where a large influx of foreign nationals regularly occurs, according to Aysan.

Big land, few people

“Geography is destiny,” wrote Ibn Khaldun, a Muslim Arab historian whom some consider the father of modern sociology.

This six-century-old wisdom also means that Russia is facing a serious problem. Because the demographically declining Russia needs to populate the world’s largest country, unlike smaller nations like Sweden and Finland — two former enemies of the Russian Empire. Sweden, with a 10m population, and Finland, with a 5m population, control tiny territories relatively proportional to their populations.

Russians also apparently want to maintain a global power status, unlike the Swedish and Finnish people, who have long stayed politically neutral.

“Russia's historical problem has for centuries been — how to fill a massive land area with a limited number of people that it has. So there is a demographic problem, which is not as bad as it used to be, but still requires consistent focus and effort,” says Gregory Simons, an associate professor at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University.

Simons refers to the family incentives under Putin’s leadership to encourage its ailing population to have more children in recent years. The Kremlin has also launched a policy of attracting Russian-ethnic communities from former Soviet republics in the Baltics and Central Asia to settle in Russia. But it has not been so successful, according to the professor.

There is also a looming reality for Kremlin elites that not only is the country’s population in decline but also that ethnic Russians, primarily Christians, are losing ground to Muslim minorities. Between 2010 and 2021, Russian ethnic communities diminished by 5.4 million, their population falling to 72 percent of the country’s population.

At present, Muslim ethnic groups constitute 10 percent of the country’s population. But within a decade, Muslim communities under Moscow are predicted to represent 30 percent of the Russian Federation’s population.

Experts also see a demographic motivation in Moscow’s offensive against Kiev, mainly to increase its Orthodox Slavic population by forcefully integrating Ukraine — the birthplace of the first Russian state in the 9th century — into the federation.

The Russian demographic dilemma of losing its population can create “a source of instability” for Moscow and “wider instability for its neighbourhood,” Simons tells TRT World.

The population decline is not only a political problem but also has “economic implications” regarding Russian economic capability and capacity, Simons points out.

The Ukraine conflict has forced many skilled workers to leave Russia in the largest exodus since the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to labour shortages across many sectors.

The demographic disruption will create economically ‘dead’ areas across Russia, increasing populations in popular cities that “would put more strain on infrastructure” in urban areas, complicating government finances, according to the professor.

For Moscow, repopulating its massive lands is “a high priority policy” to address the country’s “eternal issue”, says the professor. “From my understanding, the state at its different levels is getting smarter and better at approaching the problem,” he adds, referring to Russian incentives to grow its population.

Russian incentives

Under Putin, Russia has recovered some of its demographic losses parallel to improving its economic and political stability before the Ukraine conflict. Thanks to Putin’s incentives, birth rates are up, abortions down and life expectancy has increased as some Ukrainians have sought refuge in Russia, says Simons.

“In my time travelling to Russia since early 1996, the new generations of citizens have a very different understanding of values and lifestyle. For example, increasingly, youth abstain from alcohol. This is a combination of things, such as increased taxes on industrial alcohol to make illegal and dangerous moonshine cost prohibitive,” Simons observes.

Mete Doguoglu, a 56-year-old Moscow-based Turkish businessman, has similar observations to Simons during his long stay in Russia since the 1990s. “Through the last decade, there has been a huge incentive to have children in Russia on both material and moral grounds,” says Doguoglu, who has two children with his Russian wife.

“The concept of family is something that always stands out in Russia,” he says, adding that most people believe in the sacredness of family. Doguoglu believes the Russian population decline is partly related to the troubles of the capitalist system, whose difficult conditions force people to take less financial and social responsibilities.

Russian incentives to encourage families to have kids range from helping people buy houses with ‘maternity capital’ payments to tax breaks, educational benefits and free public transportation, according to Doguoglu. The Russian state also exempts males with three kids and more from military service in Ukraine, says Doguoglu.

“Russia surely has a demographic problem, but the state is so actively fighting against this problem,” adds Doguoglu.