Moscow Should have a 100-Year Plan for Demography, Not the 10-Year Plan It has Now, Demographer in Russian Far East Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 5 – Changing demographic trends is a long-term proposition, Elena Li says; and that means that Moscow should adopt a 100-year plan for demography in place of the 10-year plan it now has. At least one federal subject, the Sakha Republic, recognizes this and has shown the way by its recent adoption of a longer-term plan.

            The demographer at the Eastern Center for State Planning in the Russian Far East says that unless one makes plans for several generations, there is very little chance that the country will change direction and overcome its current decline in population (eastrussia.ru/material/demografiya-dalnego-vostoka-nas-vse-menshe-no-est-nyuans/).

            In the course of a wide-ranging and data-filled interview with the EastRussia portal, Li makes five other important points:

·       The population of the Far Eastern Federal District continues to decline and at a rate three times that of the Russian Federation as a whole, 3.5 percent annually as opposed to just over one percent.

·       The biggest population decline in the Far Eastern FD came not in the 1990s as many assume but in the first decade of this century. The situation improved somewhat between 2008 and 2018 before declining again because of the covid pandemic during which “the death rate rose and the birth rate fell.”

·       In 2024, immigration into the Far Eastern FD exceeded the number leaving for the first time in many years, a pattern that reflected fewer leaving rather than more coming in.

·       Culture and values rather than economics are the chief drivers of the birth rate, and changing them is hard. Where people are disposed to have more children, they have them as in Sakha; where they are not, they don’t.

·       If the Far East “doesn’t stop the outflow of people by creating a milieu for a high-quality life, “no migration will save it. It is necessary not only ‘to give birth;’ it is necessary that the children be happy so that people won’t leave and that those who do will eventually return.”