by Paul Morland
The problem for the Soviet Army was particularly acute and reflected a more general problem. Loyalty mattered more directly among soldiers than among citizens as a whole. Poorly educated soldiers from the central Asian republics were less effective and, as the Hapsburgs had discovered, it was difficult to organise a modern mass army on multilingual lines. By the final years of the Soviet Union up to three-quarters of recruits from central Asia could not speak Russian.23 Furthermore, while the general data above shows the rise of Russia’s Muslim population at an aggregate level, this was seen more acutely among eighteen-year-old recruits than at the level of the population as a whole. The Muslim population was disproportionately young and so the young population–which was being recruited into the military–was disproportionately Muslim.
From the 1970s the debate within Soviet academic and policy circles focused particularly on the tension between the need to have a growing population and the wish to ensure its ‘quality’ or (when code was not used) its Russianness. The first concerns of an ethnic nature came to the surface after the 1970 census, which suggested that the Russian demographic high tide had passed. Voices began to be raised in favour of a ‘differentiated’ population policy, encouraging more births in Russia and in the Slavic republics and fewer in those of the Caucasus and central Asia. The debate became polarised between ‘differentiators’ favouring discriminatory pro-natalism and those denouncing it as being contrary to the spirit and ideology of the country. Among the latter were ‘non-differentiators’ from central Asia arguing that a differentiated policy was tantamount to being discriminatory, even if it was dressed up as an attempt to even out fertility rates by lowering them where they were high and raising them where they were low. The anti-differentiators cited General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev as suggesting that the large families produced in the peripheral republics were seen as a source of delight, not of concern, and an Uzbek politician (perhaps somewhat tongue in cheek) praised the ‘leading role’ of the Uzbeks in boosting the Soviet population. (‘Leading role’ was a term usually reserved for describing the Party’s job in directing society.) The debate continued up to the Twenty-Sixth Party Congress in 1981 when, however, it was resolved in favour of the differentiators, Brezhnev acknowledging that the problem of demography had ‘become more acute of late’ and announcing policies such as paid leave and a shorter working day for mothers.24 It was left for his colleague Nikolai Tikhonov to clarify that the new policies were to be rolled out ‘step by step’, republic by republic, effectively meaning that they would be implemented in Russia first and only later, if ever, in central Asia and the Caucasus.25 In fact, they were first introduced in the Soviet Far East and in Siberia, areas in which Russia has traditionally wished to boost its sparse population.26 They never reached the Muslim periphery.
Demography and the Collapse of the Soviet Union
Demography played a role in the demise of the Soviet Union both economically and ethnically. Economically, the reduction of the growth in the workforce was an important component in failing Soviet economic growth rates, or put another way, an inefficient economic system had been buoyed up by exceptionally high growth rates in the key input of labour; once this failed, the system failed. This was accentuated by the fact that the growth in the labour force was increasingly coming from areas where educational and productivity levels were poor. Perhaps even more important, the breakdown of the Soviet Union into its component parts and the rise of nationalism can be seen as a reflection of the waning of the ethnic Russian demographic presence.
The Soviet Union, despite its nomenclature, can be seen essentially as an extension of the Russian imperial state. For it to hold together, it needed the presence of a dominant language and culture. The ideology of Marxism-Leninism and the centralising institution of the Communist Party were simply not enough. Although the most prominent challenges to Russian hegemony came from places like the Baltic states, which posed no demographic threat, Russian confidence in its ability to hold the state together was sapped by its waning presence in the periphery of the country and the rising and uncontrollable ethnic tensions and conflicts in places like Nagorno-Karabakh. Add to this the problems of holding together an increasingly ethnically and linguistically diverse army and it becomes clear that many of the pressures which brought down the USSR had at least partially demographic roots. It was in the increasingly de-Russified Caucasus that the failure of Soviet control first became evident. Clashes between Armenians and Azeris broke out in early 1988, nearly three years before the Soviet Union’s formal demise.
For Russia, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant a retreat from territories it long considered core. For non-Russian nationalities, it meant the opportunities and challenges of independence, more or less to be circumscribed over time by proximity to Russia and the latter’s sense of their being part of the ‘near abroad’. For the world, it meant the end of the cold war and, specifically, the triumph of the United States and its allies over the Eastern bloc.
Just as the fall of the Soviet Union had more than purely demographic causes, so the West’s cold war triumph had more causes than just the fall of the Soviet Union–including its own dynamism in contrast to the moribund nature of the economy and society in the countries of the Warsaw Pact. Nevertheless, some have claimed that if the Soviet Union had been as ethnically homogeneous as China, it would still be in business.27 Cuba and North Korea, lacking real ethnic cleavages, have continued to pursue Soviet-style policies of central planning and no or very limited private property which continue to impoverish their peoples, yet their regimes cling on a generation after the Soviet collapse. That the Soviet Union was not ethnically more homogeneous was due, ultimately, to demography and specifically to the differential timing of the demographic transition between the very different areas of what was the world’s largest country.
Is Russia Dying?
In 1991 the USSR was formally dissolved and its predominant Russian component, the RSFSR, became the Russian Federation. Since then the country has gone through the chaos of the Yeltsin years and the more orderly if less liberating Putin years, with its economy first buoyed by the high price of hydrocarbons and then hit by their fall. Meanwhile the demographic problems carried over from the Soviet era–low fertility, poor life expectancy and the waning of Russians as an ethnic group–have continued to dog the country, although with some signs of improvement.
According to the United Nations, Russia’s total fertility rate stood at a little over one and a half children per woman in the early 1990s and fell to one and a quarter in the latter part of that decade, since when it has recovered somewhat to around one and two-thirds children per woman.28 This recovery is material but does not mask the fact that Russian fertility rates are low, if not among the world’s lowest. The shock of the collapse of Communism and the ensuing chaos and financial difficulties are generally seen as important causes of the low levels of the 1990s. Shortages of housing in urban areas are often cited too, while in addition the child benefits of late Soviet times have been swept away in real terms by rampant inflation. More intangible and difficult to quantify is an anti-natal culture which is not a recent phenomenon. For some, anti-natalism can be expressed as a horror of large families, and the association of such families with the rural peasantry and the uneducated. Of course this attitude is not a singularly Russian phenomenon but can be seen in many societies which have recently undergone a process of modernisation.29
Although superficially Russia’s low fertility rate bears similarities to the fertility rates experienced in southern and central Europe, there are some notable differences. During the Soviet period, when the Russian fertility rate was already low, Russian women had not adopted the tendency of women further west to delay childbirth. Around the time that the Soviet Union ended, the average age of first childbirth was just short of twenty-two. Although this began to change in the New Russia, the change was only gradual: by 2004: the average age of the mother at the birth of her first child was no
t much over twenty-three.30 This is good and bad news for Russian fertility rates. On the positive side, it means that the recovery of fertility in the recent decade or so has been despite the (admittedly modest) tempo effect of women delaying childbearing, in contrast to a recovery of fertility in northern Europe which has been largely attributable to the ending or slowing of the tempo effect. This may mean that the underlying vigour of the jump in the total fertility rate is slightly greater than it appears. The bad news is that, with childbearing occurring so early in the life of the average Russian woman, there is plenty of potential for the tempo effect to kick in. In other words, if Russian women decide to delay childbearing until their late twenties or early thirties, the period during which they do so will witness depressed fertility.
There are several other noteworthy characteristics of Russian fertility. One is the continued tendency for women to have only one child. In other countries with low fertility there is a wide spread between women having no children and women having several. In Russia, one child per woman has been very common and childless women have been fairly rare. This was markedly the case in the Soviet era (although there are now some indications that it is beginning to change and that the number of childless women is starting to grow).31 Thus low fertility in Russia essentially stems from women choosing to stop childbearing after one child. Where a second child is born, the gap between the first and second child is larger in Russia than in the West.32 In other ways Russia continues to be fairly unlike those countries of the West which have undergone the second demographic transition: premarital cohabitation has, at least until recently, remained relatively unusual and marriage (as well as first childbearing) remains fairly early.33 Abortion rates have however halved since Soviet times, presumably because of the wider availability of affordable contraception.34
Meanwhile it is worth noting what has been happening to fertility in the rest of the former Soviet Union since its demise. The Baltic states all witnessed declines after the end of the USSR but have seen some modest recovery, like Russia to around or slightly above the one and a half children per woman level. A similar pattern can be observed in Belarus and Ukraine. In the former Muslim republics, fertility has dropped sharply, in line with developments in the wider Islamic world which will be investigated later. Azerbaijani women have shifted from bearing just under three children to a little over two children since the collapse of the USSR, and even Uzbek women, once the childbearing champions of the Soviet Union, have reduced their fertility from around four children in 1990 to two and a half at the latest count.35
While life expectancy in the Soviet Union after 1945 was paltry compared to what was achieved in the United States and, even more so, in Western Europe, as noted above, in the post-Soviet era the divergence widened. Life expectancy for Russian men fell from sixty-four in 1989 to fifty-eight in 2001. This bears extremely poor comparison not only to what had been and was still being achieved in the West by way of lengthening life expectancy, but also in growing parts of the developing world. In the same year India, with a per capita income less than one-third of the Russian level, achieved male life expectancy of two years longer.36 The gap between male and female life expectancy in Russia is exceptionally high. In 2008, when male life expectancy had recovered to the age of fifty-nine, the life expectancy of Russian women was seventy-three,37 and the most recent UN data suggests that while male life expectancy is recovering it is still only back to where it was fifty years ago. The extraordinarily wide gap between male and female life expectancy in Russia (three or four years is normal for most countries, but the latest UN data suggests more than a decade for Russia) indicates that Russia’s mortality problem lies essentially with its men.
The most often cited problem related to low life expectancy is alcoholism. Here, although Russia’s alcohol consumption per capita is not much higher than that of some west European countries, in Russia it seems to be concentrated among men and in drinking bouts. Interestingly, a drop in alcohol consumption in the mid to late nineties was accompanied by a modest fall in mortality.38 Another contributing factor to poor life expectancy is the fact that Russia’s suicide rate is one of the highest in the world; it was the cause of over 50,000 deaths in 2000.39 The atmosphere of morbidity in the immediate post-Soviet era was captured by one correspondent:
The deaths kept piling up. People–men and women–were falling, or perhaps jumping, off trains and out of windows; asphyxiating in country houses with faulty wood stoves or in apartments with jammed front-door locks; getting hit by cars that sped through quiet courtyards or ploughed down groups of people on a sidewalk; drowning as a result of diving drunk into a lake or ignoring sea-storm warnings or for no apparent reason; poisoning themselves with too much alcohol, counterfeit alcohol, alcohol substitutes, or drugs; and, finally, dropping dead at absurdly early ages from heart attacks and strokes.40
Beyond alcoholism and suicide, there would appear to be a number of other factors contributing to Russia’s higher mortality and low life expectancy. The death rate from infectious and parasitic diseases stands at more than double the level experienced in the EU, and death from cardiovascular disease appears to be at near twice the level which would be expected given Russia’s GDP. Overall levels of spending on health care in Russia are low even relative to GDP, and the levels of service may be worse than they were in Soviet days.41
Although there has been some modest improvement (in part thanks to lower suicide rates and some reduction in alcoholism), Russian male life expectancy is no further ahead than it was in the late 1960s, since when the world as a whole has witnessed an improvement in life expectancy of a decade and a half. This means that Russia lags behind countries such as Egypt and Pakistan.42 Because Russia’s infant mortality rate is not particularly bad, the picture of life expectancy at age fifteen is even worse when compared to others. However, the result is that Russia does not have quite the same ageing problem as most countries in Europe. Falling childbearing tends to increase the average age in a society, but premature deaths of those who would be elderly has the reverse effect. At under thirty-nine, Russia’s median age is a full eight years older than it was in the mid 1970s but seven years younger than Germany’s.43 It is little comfort for a society, though, that it is not ageing because so many people are dying in middle age and never reaching old age.
The great difference between Russia and central and southern Europe is that while both are experiencing a fertility rate well below replacement level, in the latter this is somewhat compensated for by rising life expectancy whereas in Russia falling life expectancy (i.e. rising mortality) has until recently compounded the impact of low fertility and resulted in a sharp natural decline in the population. In the nine years after 1992 there were more than 12 million more deaths in Russia than births.44 Other countries have reached a similar position of natural decline, but invariably this is in spite of falling mortality rather than in part because of rising mortality.
The fact that the Russian population has not dropped as fast as the natural decrease would suggest is thanks to migration. With the ending of the Soviet Union, Russia became in population terms a much smaller entity than its erstwhile Soviet self. At the time of the break-up, the Soviet population was 287 million and Russia’s population was peaking at nearly 148 million; by 2015 it was under 143 million.45 The vast bulk of this loss is, of course, not due to birth or death rates but to the shrinkage of the state which no longer covers now independent countries from Estonia to Kazakhstan. Nevertheless, with Russia’s poor balance of births and death, UN forecasts based on median fertility suggest that by the end of the current century it will have fewer than 125 million people, while some forecasts say it will sink below the 100 million mark (although recent gains in fertility rates and life expectancy make this less likely).46 Although there are grounds for some optimism, this is a far cry from the heady days of the Soviet Union when the population was approaching three times the hundred million mark. A mixture of low fertility, high mort
ality and imperial retreat has made Russia a much diminished entity from the one of seemingly boundless imperial ambition at the start of the twentieth century. Unsurprisingly, this has had geopolitical consequences.
As is usual when a country’s population is stagnant or falling, it is the outlying districts that feel it first. Urbanisation continues as people carry on moving from the countryside to the towns and cities, and in Russia this is particularly so because of the remoteness and inhospitable climate of so much of the country. The Soviet Union was vast and many of the peripheral areas were populated by Russians thanks only to the efforts of the state; once the state was enfeebled and less willing to direct people to places, it was inevitable that the process of settling distant areas reversed itself as people abandoned places denuded of facilities, infrastructure and job opportunities. In one village to the west of Moscow where only eight people remain, a local resident laments: ‘only old people are left here. And what do we, old people, do? We die.’ One in ten villages in Russia had fewer than ten inhabitants in 2010; today the number is probably considerably worse.47
Putin Fights Back
The newly self-confident and assertive Russia of Vladimir Putin, in contrast to the chaotic post-Soviet era of Boris Yeltsin, is not short of critics, who will point out that much of the apparent resurgence depends on a veneer financed unsustainably up to 2014 by high oil and gas prices. Whether or not such criticism is justified, Putin’s efforts go beyond a military build-up, annexation of Crimea and intervention in Syria; his regime is aware of the demographic crisis and would very much like to be able to count a demographic resurgence among its achievements. A significant milestone was a major speech in 2006 in which Putin spoke of ‘the most acute problem facing our country today–the demographic problem’.48 Twenty-five years after Brezhnev spoke to the Twenty-Sixth Congress, demography had gone from being acknowledged as simply one of many national problems to being seen as the most serious issue confronting the nation.
