Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 8 – The number of
births in Russia fell from 390,200 in the first quarter of 2018 to 355,200 in
the first three months of this year, a 9.1 percent decline; and the falloff was
across the board: in all but three federal subjects – Moscow city, Magadan
Oblast and Karachayevo-Cherkessia, the number of newborns either fell or
remained constant.
The biggest declines were in Moscow
Oblast, Oryol Oblast, Krasnodar Kray, the Chukchi Autonomous District, and Amur
Oblast, all of which saw declines of more than 15 percent and all but the
Chukchi AD are overwhelmingly ethnic Russian. The three with gains increased
only two percent (Karachayevo-Cherkessia) to 5.1 percent (Moscow city).
Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana
Golikova released these figures at a meeting of the Presidential Council on
Strategic Development and Priority Projects (rbc.ru/economics/08/05/2019/5cd2d5399a79475a79899e11?from=from_main).
She did have some
good news: infant mortality fell by 15.7 percent to a historic low of 4.3
deaths per 1,000 live births, a figure that the authorities had projected to be
achieved only in 2024. But that wasn’t
enough to stem the decline in Russia’s population, which fell in the first
quarter of 2019 by 106,700, far more than the fall of 87,300 in the first three
months of last year.
Immigration did little to compensate
for this domestic decline, and the overall population fell in the course of
2018 by 99,700 to 146,780,720, including occupied Crimea and Stavropol. Golikova said that officials expect that “the
negative trend f natural loss of population will begin to change in 2023-2024.”
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