Five More Worrisome Demographic Developments in Russia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 13 – Despite the Kremlin’s upbeat reports about declines in infant mortality and improvements in life expectancy, the past few days have brought five reports about demographic data that are anything but positive and that indeed promise to have an increasingly negative impact on Russia until the Putin system is replaced.

            They are:

1.      Komsomolskaya Pravda today documents that under Putin, Russia has far too many people in the force structures and in government offices and far too few workers to ensure economic growth (kp.ru/daily/26756.5/3786426/).

2.      Kommersant reports that the inequality of property ownership in Russia is now just as high as it was in 1905 at the time for the first Russian revolution (kommersant.ru/doc/3462081).

3.      Vzglyad notes that divorces are now so numerous in Russia that they are by themselves having a negative impact on birthrates and social stability in Russia (vz.ru/society/2017/11/13/889977.html).

4.      Regional news agencies are reporting that migrants are no longer making up for natural declines and outmigration from the millionaire cities of Russia, depressing the amount of funds they get from Moscow and calling into question their futures as centers of development (afterempire.info/2017/11/13/babkina/ and kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5A042202234AE).

5.      Demoscope Weekly reports that no nations in the Russian Federation now have birthrates more than twice those of ethnic Russians but that more than 30 of these ethnic groups have higher birthrates than Russians do and that most of these are traditionally Muslim (demoscope.ru/weekly/2017/0711/tema04.php), a pattern compounded by the fact that many of these Muslim groups because rates of alcohol consumption are so much lower than among Russians have far greater life expectancies than Russians do with people in Daghestan, one of the poorest republics, living on average five years more than Russians do (newstracker.ru/news/society/10-11-2017/prodolzhitelnost-zhizni-v-dagestane-dostigla-istoricheskogo-maksimuma-a7b997af-3734-437a-96a6-5a8bd62ec01a).