Russia has No Chance to Achieve Population Growth Anytime Soon, Krupnov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 13 – Not only has the Russian population declined for the second year in a row and by numbers higher than in more than a decade, but the declining size of the prime child-bearing cohort of women and ever lower birthrates mean that “it will be impossible to achieve growth in the population in the coming years,” Yury Krupnov says.

            Indeed, the specialist at the Moscow Institute of Demography, Migration and Regional Development says, the natural decline will rise to more than 500,000 a year by 2024, a figure close to those characteristic of the disastrous “pit” of the 1990s (mk.ru/social/2019/11/07/k-2024-godu-ubyl-naseleniya-rossii-stanet-kolossalnoy.html).

            Rosstat figures show that during the first 11 months of this year, deaths exceeded births by 259,600, putting Russia on course to suffer a decline in population greater than at anytime since 2008 when the analogous figure was 362,000. Immigration isn’t compensating for this  (gks.ru/storage/mediabank/osn-10-2019.pdf).

            Worse, the state statistics agency says, there were 102,600 fewer children born during the first 11 months of this year than during the same period in 2018, and the problem is countrywide: births fell in 80 of the 85 federal subjects of the Russian Federation (including occupied Sevastopol and Crimea).

            The worst performances were in predominantly ethnic Russian areas; the only “bright spots” were in Muslim-majority ones, yet another reason why Russians and Russian officials will view these numbers with concern (https://www.mk.ru/social/2019/12/13/demografy-predupredili-o-rekordnom-sokrashhenii-naseleniya-rossii.html).