Paul Goble
Staunton, May 21 – Russian commentators and officials have comforted themselves for many years with the idea that birthrate in Russian villages are sufficiently high that they will cushion the country from the dramatically declining figures on that metric in Russian urban areas and even prompted some to call for “de-urbanizing” Russia to solve its demographic problems.
But figures released by the Russian government’s statistical arm Rosstat show that in 2025 the fertility rate for Russia’s rural population had fallen to 1.464, slightly above the all-Russian figure including city residents but the lowest figure for rural Russia in 35 years (vedomosti.ru/society/articles/2026/05/21/1198799-summarnii-koeffitsient-rozhdaemosti-v-selah-stal-minimalnim).
The rural figure is far below the 2.2 children per woman per lifetime needed to keep the population of the country as a whole level and, even more than that, also mean that rural Russia now can do little to help compensate for the overall decline that is led by urban residents where the fertility rate is approaching 1.0 in some of the largest.
The only time since the end of the USSR where rural population fertility rates were even as high as 2.2 was in 2014, when Rosstat reports that it reached 2.272. Since then it has fallen by almost one child per rural Russian woman per lifetime, a decline that tracks with what is going on in Russian cities.
Two other developments Rosstat reports now are also likely to be worrisome to Moscow officials. First, the only federal subjects where the fertility rate is still above 2.2 are where there are non-Russian majorities such as Tuva where it stands at 2.56; and second, the decline in fertility rates in rural areas fell from 2024 to 2025 at twice the rate of urban areas, 0.06 compared to 0.03, in part because of Putin’s optimization program that has closed rural hospitals.
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