Fertility Rates in North Caucasus Falling with Chechnya Alone having One Just Above Replacement Level

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 4 – Historically and in the minds of many still today, the North Caucasus is a place where families include many children. Even Vladimir Putin is given to recommending that Russians copy the North Caucasian pattern to overcome Russia’s population decline (kavkazr.com/a/pravozaschitniki-raskritikovali-predlozhenie-putina-zhenitj-detey/33629760.html).

            But in reality, Natalya Kildiyarova of the Kavkazr portal says, that picture is out of date. Fertility rates, the number of children per woman per lifetime, have been falling across the North Caucasus (kavkazr.com/a/konets-demograficheskogo-isklyucheniya-chto-proishodit-s-rozhdaemostjyu-na-severnom-kavkaze/33748640.html).

            Except for Chechnya, which has a fertility rate of 2.56, just above the replacement level of 2.2, all the other national republics there have rates below that level and thus are seeing their populations decline. That means that the region is no longer the outlier it once was but is going to decline in total population, albeit not as rapidly as most of the rest of Russia.

            That of course means that the North Caucasus will in fact increase compared to predominantly ethnic Russian regions, but far less than many have been predicting and that Moscow has counted on to make up for losses in Russian areas where the fertility rate is now 1.0 or even lower. 

            On another related matter, a demographer with whom Kildiyarova spoke on condition of anonymity ts that this decline is part of a broader trend in modern societies and should not be explained by reference to the war in Ukraine. The statistics available simply do not support such conclusions, he says.

            The anonymous demographer says that his research suggests that 0.5 percent of men aged 18 to 60 have died while fighting in Ukraine but that the percentages of such losses are lower in the North Caucasus than they are in many other federal subjects and thus less likely to have a demographic impact.

            In Chechnya, for example, the percentage of men killed in Ukraine is only 0.12 percent. In Ingushetia, it is about 0.2 percent and in Dagestan, approximately 0.25 percent, far lower than the all-Russia average and much lower than in Buryatia where combat losses are 1.6 percent of the population, and Bashkortostan where the figure is 0.8 percent.