Demographic Losses in RSFSR Hit Far Beyond the Front Lines, Statistics Show

Paul Goble

    Staunton, May 7 – When people talk about the demographic losses the peoples of the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, they focus almost exclusively on the losses of the Soviet military or of civilian populations who suffered occupation. But many far from the front lines suffered as well.

    In an important article for the To Be Exact portal, demographer Aby Shukyurov provides details on these losses, separating out as much as the available data permits the losses that the RSFSR suffered from the larger ones suffered by the USSR as a whole (tochno.st/materials/my-izucili-demograficeskuiu-statistiku-vremen-velikoi-otecestvennoi-vosem-grafikov-o-tom-kak-voina-povliiala-na-naselenie-strany).

    Among his most important findings are the following:

•    Of the more than 25 million casualties the Soviet army and population suffered from the fighting, “approximately 13 million” or just over half were those of people from the RSFSR.

•    The civilian population of the RSFSR suffered some 1.8 million, far fewer than that of the Ukrainian SSR – 3.3. million – and about the same as that of the Belarusian SSR – 1.6 million – where much of the war was fought.

•    By the end of the war, the RSFSR population was 19.8 million fewer than Soviet demographers had projected. Some 12.9 million of these losses were among people over the age of four, but the radical decline in birthrates and the growth of infant and child mortality cost the RSFSR 6.9 million more.

•    The number of births in the RSFSR fell by slightly more than 50 percent between the pre-war years of 1935-1939 and the war years of 1941-1945, with the fertility rate declining from 4.3 children per woman to 1.26 by 1943, well below the replacement level of 2.2. The fertility rate rose again after the war to 2.9 in 1947 but never recovered its pre-war level.

•    In the first years of the war, approximately 30 percent of newborns in the RSFSR died because of the spread of illness, the lack of medical facilities and medications, and general social dislocation. By the end of the war, this figure had fallen back to almost what it had been earlier.

•    Some 18 million Soviet citizens were evacuated to the east, many to places with no or at least inadequate healthcare facilities. And even those who weren’t evacuated had to cut back their use of public baths, something that led to the spread of many illnesses.