Fertility Rate in Tatarstan Now Far Below Replacement Level, Kazan Demographer Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 20 – Over the last four years, the number of births in Tatarstan has fallen by ten percent, largely the result of a decline in the fertility rate to 1.45, slightly above the rate for Russia as a whole but far below the 2.2 children per lifetime per woman needed to keep the population from declining, Aygol Khuramshina says.

            The director of the Center for the Family and Demography of Tatarstan’s Academy of Sciences says that the population of the republic is continuing to grow because of inmigration from other parts of Russia and abroad but that the influx is now declining (business-gazeta.ru/article/688114 and idelreal.org/a/v-tatarstane-za-chetyre-goda-na-14-snizilas-rozhdaemost-kolichestvo-zaklyuchennyh-brakov-za-10-let-sokratilos-na-25-/33597065.html).

            And Khuramshina adds that period between the average age of the start of sexual activity – 16 – and the average age of the birth of the first child among residents of the republic – 29 -- has risen to the point that there are increasing problems of various kinds, including the impact this trend has on growth.

            But she says that it is currently impossible for demographers like herself to talk about current trends more precisely because over the last several years, the Russian government has stopped publishing data on demographic behavior and so in many cases, both scholars and officials who depend on them are flying blind.

            One thing is clear, however. In Tatarstan as in other predominantly Muslim federal subjects of the Russian Federation, birthrates are declining; and while they are not as low as those in predominantly ethnic Russian regions, they are converging on figures to be found in those oblasts, krays and cities.

            That means that traditionally Muslim peoples will continue to form a larger share of the population of the Russian Federation than they did in the past but that the rate of this increase may decline at least slightly unless fertility rates among Russians overall fall even faster overall. That is perhaps likely as the fertility rate in Moscow, for example, is already close to 1.0.