Academician's Call for De-Urbanizing Russians to Boost Fertility Rates Denounced as Genocide

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 4 – It has long been known that birthrates among Russians living in rural areas are significantly higher than those of their compatriots living in major cities, and so it is not surprising that many observers and politicians have expressed the wish that the rate of urbanization could be slowed so that the decline in fertility rates could be slowed as well.

            But on August 31, Academician Albert Bakhtizin, director of Russia’s Central Economic Mathematics Institute, proposed having Moscow carry out “a Special Demographic Operation,” to achieve that goal, an operation whose name echoes that of Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine (interfax.ru/russia/978827).

            While the academician did not call for the use of force to achieve such de-urbanization, he did not propose anything like the shifting resources to rural areas and smaller cities that would be required to make them more attractive to current residents or to lead Russians now living in cities to decide to relocate to such places and thus have more children.

            Consequently, various commentators have suggested that Bakhtizin’s plan could be realized only by force and have suggested that it thus would be a genocide, comparable to Stalin’s deportation of peoples or even more to Cambodia’s Pol Pot’s emptying out of the cities (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=66D7ED80A8450 and svpressa.ru/society/article/428080/).

            There is little sign that the Kremlin is about to take up Bakhtizin’s proposal and either forcibly move Russians out of the cities or put more money into the rest of Russia to hold and/or attract people there, but it is a measure of the depths of Russia’s demographic disaster that such ideas are even being discussed.

            For the most recent data on the collapse of the fertility rate in the Russian Federation to the lowest level since 1999, a level far below what that country needs even to replace its current population, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/07/fertility-rate-among-rf-women-fell-to.html.