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Putin’s Demographic Revival Is A Pipe Dream
The latest proposals laid out by the president are simply too little, too late.
Russia never recovered from the enormous population losses of WWII. In addition, other factors - family economics, alcoholism, a terrible healthcare system, and widespread abortion have also contributed to Russia's negative population demographics. The Russian xenophobia for immigrants and the brain-drain exodus are contributory factors. As the article points out, Putin's proposals do not even bring Russia up to a 'replenishment' (stay even) level much less a population increase. Moscow is also cheating in that it is counting the population of Crimea as an increase in the Russian population. Crimea is Ukraine territory and its 2 million inhabitants are Ukrainian citizens.
The latest proposals laid out by the president are simply too little, too late.
1/23/20
The Kremlin is once again attempting to fix Russia’s dismal demographics. In his January 15th address before the Federal Assembly, Russian President Vladimir Putin devoted the bulk of his remarks to the country’s protracted pattern of population decline – a trend which he said it is his administration’s “historic duty” to reverse. Putin plans to do so by spending billions of rubles on new subsidies designed to provide support for struggling families and encourage greater procreation (and therefore a hike in the national birth rate). But it’s already abundantly clear that these measures are entirely insufficient to pull Russia out of its downward demographic spiral. To understand why, it’s necessary to grasp the extent and persistence of Russia’s population problem. The country’s population began to decline as long ago as the 1960s, and by the 1970s total fertility had dropped to below “replenishment” — or just over two children per woman, on average — in almost all of the Soviet Union’s European republics. These statistics, however, were at odds with the U.S.S.R.’s image of itself as a great power, so Soviet leaders choose to ignore or minimize the problem. Perhaps the most notorious example of this myopia took place in early 1991 when, just months before the U.S.S.R.’s collapse, the prestigious Soviet Academy of Sciences announced triumphantly that the number of ethnic Russians within the U.S.S.R. would grow by as much as two million over the next half-decade, and would reach 158 million by 2015. That, of course, didn’t happen.
On the contrary, over the next two decades, Russia’s population decline deepened — and accelerated. The drivers of this decline were numerous, from inordinately high mortality rates to a rampant culture of abortion to a sub-par national health care system. But the results were nothing short of ruinous. In his Jan. address, President Putin admitted that Russia’s birth rate, which had been temporarily buoyed by the social measures enacted by the Kremlin in years past, is “falling again.” The country, he stressed, is entering “a very difficult demographic period.” The centerpiece of Putin’s new plan is to provide new monthly payments to young children in families with subsistence level incomes, and to expand incentives associated with the “maternal capital” campaign. But an even bigger problem is that the scope of the Kremlin’s plan is much too modest. Putin’s proposal calls for a hike of Russia’s fertility rate to 1.7 by the year 2024. While that would be a significant accomplishment in and of itself, it would nonetheless fall far short of hitting the fertility rate of 2.1 needed to keep Russia’s population stable. In other words, Putin envisions that the Russian population will continue to shrink, just at a slightly slower rate than it is currently. It’s no wonder that respected demographers like Anatoly Vishnevsky of the Russian Higher School of Economics have taken a decidedly dim view of the President’s plans. “There are no hopes of solving the fertility problem in Russia,” Vishnevsky recently told Novaya Gazeta. Sadly, all of the available data suggests that he might be right, at least under the current program the Kremlin has proposed.
Russia never recovered from the enormous population losses of WWII. In addition, other factors - family economics, alcoholism, a terrible healthcare system, and widespread abortion have also contributed to Russia's negative population demographics. The Russian xenophobia for immigrants and the brain-drain exodus are contributory factors. As the article points out, Putin's proposals do not even bring Russia up to a 'replenishment' (stay even) level much less a population increase. Moscow is also cheating in that it is counting the population of Crimea as an increase in the Russian population. Crimea is Ukraine territory and its 2 million inhabitants are Ukrainian citizens.