Since the late 1960s, Russia has been dying from the inside due to a birth rate that is too low and a death rate that is too high, says demographer Paul Morland.
Vladimir Putin is terrified by his country's falling population, he tells Jim Mora, and his invasion of Ukraine may be linked to this fear.
Vladimir Putin Photo: AFP / FILE
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“[Putin might be thinking] "If I get a hold of Ukraine I incorporate 30-40 million people and I can persuade them and persuade the world [they] are Russians or sister nations, Belarusians similarly, so I can increase my numbers that way.
“He might in some part of his mind be thinking that if I can inspire Russians with the glory of historic Russia, the great days, the tsar, the days of imperial expansion, which were of course associated with population expansion, then somehow the Russian family can grow again.”
It is more likely Putin has made a grave demographic error by invading Ukraine, Morland says.
“Losing young men does not help your population growth. It's a loss of men, but it's also a loss of people in the years when they are most likely to be fertile, most likely to be starting families. And furthermore, the economic crisis, which he must have expected was at least a risk, was going to drive emigration from Russia.”
The war isn’t going Putin's way, Morland says, and it's unlikely to have a positive impact on Russia's population.
“People may even have smaller families, he will lose men, and he will also lose people to emigration. So, if he thought it might be fine-balanced or even work to his advantage, from a demographic perspective, it was a very poor miscalculation.”
Demographically, Russia changed forever when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, he says.
“For all the ills of the Soviet Union, there was a particular certainty, there was a regime and people knew where they stood. And when that collapsed, it took them a while to figure out where they were and what they were doing.
“So, a lot of people probably felt very lost. And what's interesting in the case of Russia, in the 90s is that while life expectancy fell, generally, it fell most sharply. For men, it was a really male problem.”
At one point, there was a 15 to 20-year difference between the life expectancy of Russian men and women, Morland says.
“That was about what we now call the diseases of despair. A lot of people were thrown out of their jobs and that seems to affect the psychology of men more than women. And there was a huge alcoholism problem. And that led to a disastrous fall in life expectancy, which to be fair, they have clawed back somewhat in the last 20 years, but they're still way behind where we are. And actually, the life expectancy of Russia is similar to the life expectancy of much poorer countries, like Egypt for example.”
If Russia wants to sustain its current war, Putin will have to run a huge recruitment drive for soldiers, he says.
“I think that will be very difficult in the sort of society that doesn't have a great excess of young men. Ukraine is different, Ukraine has similar demography, but of course, they're fighting on their home turf, and they're resisting an invader. I think it'd be far harder for Russia with their kind of demography, to keep things going.”
Russia is also seeing a massive population fall outside of its major cities, he says.
“A vast number of Russian settlements have been abandoned. If you get a decline in population, you get a sort of a doom-cycle whereby villages decline, the villages that surround the town or decline, the town then is not worth investing in, maybe there's no railway line that's kept going or the once a week flight becomes a once a month flight and whole areas can go into a kind of demographic doom loop.”
Russia’s far east is particularly affected by a mass exodus, Morland says.
“There are a lot of job opportunities in the heartland, it's very hard to see why an engineer in Moscow or St Petersburg would want to go out to the sticks to keep the local generator going or to keep the railways intact. So, I think you can see a large part of Russia remaining Russian on the map, but becoming effectively uninhabited, and abandoned wasteland.”
Vladimir Putin's head seems to be in a world that no longer exists, he says.
“It's normally the case that the leaders of countries are older than the populations as a whole. And Putin has been through a particular set of experiences. He's part of a generation for whom they certainly weren't around in the period of the Second World War. But that myth of the Second World War was absolutely central to the legitimacy of the Soviet Union.
“It was drummed into people at school, it was certainly drummed into people in the KGB, where he served. He's not a communist. So, he sees beyond that to a sort of more glorious Russia.”
Morland doubts there is much stomach for the war amongst the Russian people.
“That's partly based on the fact that the demography of Russia is so very different to what it was when it was a very young country.
“It's not only the fact that families are small, but that the median age is heading for 40. And that's a very different country from the Russia of revolutionary turmoil and Second World War heroics.”
Dr Morland is an associate research fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London and a renowned authority on demography. His latest book is Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers.