|
Article Excerpt
THE Russian Federation today is in the grip of a steadily tightening mesh of serious demographic problems, for which the term "crisis" is no overstatement. This crisis is altering the realm of the possible for the country and its people--continuously, directly, and adversely. Russian social conditions, economic potential, military power, and international influence are today all subject to negative demographic constraints--and these constraints stand only to worsen over the years immediately ahead.
Russia is now at the brink of a steep population decline--a peacetime hemorrhage framed by a collapse of the birth rate and a catastrophic surge in the death rate. The forces that have shaped this path of depopulation and debilitation are powerful ones, and they are by now deeply rooted in Russian soil. Altering Russia's demographic trajectory would be a formidable task under any circumstances. As yet, unfortunately, neither Russia's political leadership nor the voting public that sustains it have even begun to face up to the enormous magnitude of the country's demographic challenges.
Negative population growth
On New Year's Day 1992--one week after the dissolution of the Soviet Union--Russia's population was estimated to be 148.7 million. As of mid 2004, according to the Russian State Statistics Committee (Goskomstat), the Russian Federation's population was 143.8 million. During its first eleven and a half years of post-Communist independence, Russia's population had apparently declined by almost five million people, or over 3 percent.
In proportional terms, this was by no means the largest population loss recorded during that period. According to estimates and projections by the U.N. Bureau of the Census, over a dozen states with a million people or more experienced a population decline between mid 1992 and mid 2004, 11 of these amounting to drops of 3.1 percent or more. Unlike some of these drops, however--Bosnia, for example, whose population total fell almost 10 percent--Russia's decline could not be explained by war or violent upheaval. In other places, population decline was due entirely to emigration (Armenia, Kazakhstan), or nearly so (Georgia). Russia, by contrast, had absorbed a substantial net influx of migrants during those years--a total net addition of over 5.5 million newcomers was tabulated between the territory's Soviet-era January 1989 census and its October 2002 population count.
Despite the mitigating impact of immigration, Russia's post-Communist population decline was larger in absolute terms than any other country's over the past decade. Furthermore, continuing population decline--at a decidedly faster tempo--is envisioned for Russia for as far as demographers care to project into the future. The only question is how steep the downward path will be. The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, offers the relatively optimistic projection of a "mere" 14 million person drop in Russia's population between 2000 and 2025--an average net decline of about 560,000 persons a year. The U.N. Population Division's (UNPD) "medium variant" projection, by contrast, suggests a drop of more than 21 million over that same quarter century--about 840,000 persons a year for the period as a whole.
In the years ahead, Russia's population decline will continue to accelerate because the prospective flow of net migration into Russia is drying up. The officially tabulated annual levels of immigration to, and emigration from, Russia have declined markedly since the early 1990s--and officially measured net inflows to Russia have likewise dropped very significantly. These official numbers reflect the swelling, cresting, and spending of the migration wave of ethnic Russians from the "near abroad" who resettled to the Russian Federation during and immediately after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The draw of Russia to the (now smaller) pool of overseas Russians appears to have been much diminished, while the allure to foreign ethnics of living on Russian soil does not seem to be increasing appreciably. Russia's reported economic growth rate in the very first years of the twenty-first century has been positive, even brisk. Nevertheless, according to official figures, the net inflow of migration to Russia totaled less than 80,000 in all of 2002, and a mere 25,000 in the first seven months of 2003. By the first quarter of 2004, according to official statistics, the officially tallied surfeit of immigrants over emigrants was barely 4,000 persons.
With in-migration flows thus subsiding, Russia's population must mirror, with ever-greater faithfulness, the actual balance of births and deaths within the country. And in post-Communist Russia, the current disproportion between deaths and births is stark, indeed astonishing.
Russia, to be sure, is not the only European country registering more deaths than births nowadays--according to the Council of Europe's numbers, fully 19 European states currently report "negative natural increase." But, in other European settings, the balance is often still quite close. For example, in Italy--the poster child in many current discussions of a possible "depopulation" of Europe--there are today about 103 deaths for every 100 live births. Russia, by contrast, currently reports about 160 deaths for every 100 births.
Examples of extreme surfeits of mortality over natality are, to be sure, familiar from human history. But in the past, these were witnessed only during times of famine, pestilence, war, or mass disaster. As a peacetime phenomenon it is utterly new, and while it is not unique to...
|
