Russia’s Population has Declined for Seven Years in a Row, Rosstat Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 31 – Rosstat, the Russian government’s statistical arm, concedes that the population of the Russian Federation has fallen for the seventh straight year and that immigrants now compensate for only two-thirds of that amount (moscowtimes.ru/2025/01/31/rosstat-konstatiroval-sokraschenie-naseleniya-rossii-sedmoi-god-podryad-a153916).
    Examining these figures and the Russian government’s response to them, independent Russian demographer Aleksey Raksha makes five key points which help to explain why the situation may be even worse than Rosstat suggests it is and why Russian government efforts to counter it have been so ineffective (t.me/RakshaDemography/4280):
1.    Abortion restrictions and bans “do not increase birthrates.” That hasn’t happened in other countries and won’t happen in Russia whatever the Duma and  the Kremlin think.
2.    University students give birth to “about 0.5 percent of all children” in Russia, a share so small that the Kremlin’s focus on this group and providing it with money to have children won’t have the result the country’s rulers want.
3.    The fertility rate in Russia continues to fall and now stands at just over 1.4 children per woman per lifetime, far below the 2.2 needed to maintain the current level of population.
4.    Rosstat did not include Chechnya or Crimea in its 1999 assessments and so its conclusions about Russian population changes understate the level of decline over the last quarter of century.
5.    None of the tactics the regime has adopted to boost the birthrate have worked or are likely to do so in the future.