All Former Soviet Republics Except Russia have Become More Mono-Ethnic Since 1991

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 2 – All the former Soviet republics and the three Baltic countries which were occupied by the USSR have become more mono-ethnic over the last 30 years with the departure of members of other groups, primarily ethnic Russians, and higher growth rates among the titular nationalities than among the minorities.

            “If in 1991,” the RBC news agency comments in reporting this trend, “the picture in several of them led to skepticism about the possibility of constructing ‘nation states,’ by the middle of the 2010, there was no reason to question that.” But there was one major exception: the Russian Federation, where the share of ethnic Russians declined, albeit slightly.

            Exact and comparable figures, of course, are hard to come by. The successor states and the restored Baltic countries have conducted censuses at different times and have released different amounts of data, and in places where there are “unrecognized territories,” not all the population is counted (rbc.ru/society/09/12/2021/61af3dab9a7947c72ecf6ff5).

            This demographic trend is often ignored in comparison with two others, the first involving the increasing division between those whose populations have increased and those whose populations have fallen, and the second, related to the first, between those populations which are aging and those which are becoming younger.

            The six predominantly Muslim countries of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan have all seen their populations increase over the last 30 years from between 13 percent in Kazakhstan to 67 percent in Tajikistan, while the other nine have seen their populations fall to between a few percent in Russia and 28 percent in Latvia.

            This path of growth and decline means that among those with greatest growth, the share of people under the age of 14 has jumped to a third or more in most cases, while that among those with declines, the share in that age cohort has fallen to 14 to 16 percent, with Russia in the range of the latter.