Russia, the sick man of Europe

Public Interest, Wntr, 2005 by Nicholas Eberstadt

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 Russia these days--the excess of deaths over births is nearly as great today in Belarus, Bulgaria, and Latvia, and even more exaggerated in Ukraine--the Russian Federation is perhaps the most important example of this post-Communist demographic condition.

Russia's abrupt and brutal swerve onto the path of depopulation began during the final crisis of the Soviet state. Over the two decades before Mikhail Gorbachev's 1985 accession to power, Russia's births regularly exceeded deaths; natural increase typically ranged from 700,000 to 1,000,000 during those years. After 1987, however, births began to fall sharply, and deaths to rise. Both tendencies were further accentuated after the collapse of the USSR. The first full year of post-Communist governance for Russia, 1992, also marked the shift to negative natural increase for the Russian Federation, with 200,000 more deaths than births. A decade later, Russia's death total was over 50 percent higher than in 1987 (2.3 million vs. 1.5 million), while its birth level was over one million lower (1.4 million vs. 2.5 million). In 1987, Russia recorded a natural increase of 968,000; in 2002, deaths surpassed births by almost exactly the same magnitude (935,000).

This is an extraordinary result, but it is hardly exceptional. Tabulated deaths have outnumbered births by 900,000 or more in Russia in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002, by nearly 900,000 in 2003, and by over 420,000 in the first half of 2004. In all, between the eve of 1992 and the summer of 2004 the Russian Federation evidently recorded 10 million more burials than births.

Where have all the babies gone?

Russia's current depopulation bears all the trappings of a "demographic shock," reflecting the vast, historic change from Soviet totalitarianism to a commercial democracy. Though it might seem reasonable to expect that earlier, more "normal" demographic patterns would reassert themselves as the reverberations from Russia's "transition" subside, there are good reasons to believe that Russia's current, seemingly anomalous population trends define a new norm for the country. Remarkably low birth rates and terrifyingly high death rates can accurately be described as regular, rather than transitory, features of the new Russian demographic terrain. A powerful and self-reinforcing network of social factors--forces typically resistant to rapid or easy emendation--will likely keep fertility low and mortality high in the Russian Federation. Until these fundamentals change, depopulation and tragically foreshortened lives will be the distinguishing features of the Russian population profile.

Consider Russia's current fertility patterns. In a society with the Russian Federation's present survival patterns, women must bear an average of about 2.33 children per lifetime to assure population stability over successive generations. In the late Soviet era, Russian fertility levels were near replacement: The country's total fertility rate (TFR) fluctuated near two births per woman from the mid 1960s through the mid 1980s. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian fertility rate likewise collapsed, plummeting from 2.19 births per woman in 1986-87 to 1.17 in 1999. Moreover, extreme subreplacement fertility is not peculiar to certain regions of Russia today; to the contrary, it prevails across almost the entire territorial expanse of the Federation.