In the 1990’s, Russia was facing a demographical crisis comparable to war. Under Putin’s government, the fall into abyss slowed down, maybe even stopped. But this may not last forever: the current growth has very weak foundations.

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After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a bloody, yet undeclared war broke out in Russia. It was not a civil war, even though the victims were mainly Russians and their number resembles one.

The number of unnatural deaths in the 1990’s was typical of a country at war. Every fourth Russian male died prematurely. Among the most frequent causes were alcohol poisoning or drug overdose, suicide, violent death, and car accident.

In the last year of the Soviet Union, Russian males had a life expectancy of 63 years, while three years after its dissolution, it declined to mere 56 years, dropping to the 1955 level in no time.

Note: The demographical data were retrieved from the Russian statistics bureau. It is possible that some numbers, like the Soviet statistics from the 1980’s, might differ from reality. But the basic population statistics correspond to the non-Russian sources and compared to the developments elsewhere in the world, similar trends seem to appear here. Mutual comparison of Russian data does not indicate any anomalies, inconsistencies or intentional manipulation of statistics either.

One of the main causes of premature deaths in Russia has been excessive alcohol consumption. Alcohol poisoning itself has caused 20 % of premature deaths in males, while many other accidents and diseases are alcohol related. When the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev launched an anti-alcohol campaign in 1985 and banned the sales of alcohol before 2 p.m., male life expectancy increased by three years. But the “dry law” effect did not last for long. “Soon, there was a shortage of sugar in Russia,” explains Martin Dorazín, the Russia correspondent at Czech Radio. “Home distilleries bought it up and were supplying the black market with liquor. Furthermore, the prohibition never worked in the Caucasus, local wineries were unaffected by it and alcohol was available there for the whole time.”

Alcohol and drugs themselves cannot explain the seven-year drop in life expectancy. “The end of the Soviet Union was a crisis for a much larger part of society than, say, the collapse of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia,” explains the political geographer Michael Romancov from the Faculty of Sciences of the Charles University. “The number of people directly addicted to the state budget was much higher compared to Czechoslovakia. They were the ones most affected by the crash of socialist economy,” Romancov adds.

What followed is described in Dying Unneeded, a book by the ethnologist Michelle Parsons. “One woman, Margarita, told me with disgust,” quotes Parsons from one of the interviews with Russians, “that the 1990’s felt like a war has just ended. She couldn’t understand it, because there was no war at that time.”

During the interviews, Parsons gradually uncovers what the main cause of the high mortality rate might be. “The Russians I interviewed talked a lot about being unneeded, they felt like they couldn’t really give anyone anything. It became apparent how much the political and economic transformation undermined their social relationships. Before that, they could have used their positions in the government to help the others, but suddenly they couldn’t. It was mostly the men who felt ‘unneeded’ – Russian women had at least their families, but neither family, nor the state needed the men”, says Parsons.

Even the figures indicate that the “feeling of being unneeded” was much less an issue for women. The gap in life expectancy of both genders grew much wider; whereas women could expect to live until 71 in the 1990’s, men had only 57 years ahead of them. Mainly Russian women over forty started to feel the impact of this, as they began rapidly losing their partners. At the age of forty, there were 100 women to 95 men, dropping to 91, 79 and 65 men at the ages of fifty, sixty and seventy, respectively. For seniors, the ratio was 100 to 49.

Age structure of the Russian population, data from 2010.

The population pyramid reveals another serious problem of the 1990’s: low birth rate. The weak Yeltsin-era generation does to a certain degree copy the Brezhnev-era one, which in turn resembles the demographic drop caused by World War II, but this only explains one part of the curve.

The rest of the decrease was caused by low fertility. Since the 1960’s, the ratio of children to women was somewhere around the level of simple reproduction, that is slightly over 2 children to 1 woman. In the 1990’s, this number decreased dramatically. Between 1993 to 2006, it was 1.3 children to 1 woman, in the cities even less, in Moscow and Saint Petersburg dropping to as low as 1.1.

Both these trends – high mortality rate and low birth rate – led to a level of extinction unusual for a country at times of peace. From the dissolution of the Soviet Union until 2010, more than 13 million Russians vanished within the natural decrease, which is the difference between people born and deceased. This means that in 20 years, 9 % of the population died out.

Russia has been filling this menacing gap with migrants from the former Soviet republics. “It may look absurd, but people from the former Soviet Union find Russia very attractive,” Romancov says. “Economy-wise, many post-Soviet countries are much worse-off.”

But the constant influx of migrants couldn’t replace the dying out Russians completely. There was simply not enough children, so despite the inflow of migrants, Russia faced depopulation. Right after the dissolution of the Soviet empire, Russia had population 148 million, in 2010 it was 5 million less.

Russia, the country at war

Journalist Masha Gessen also describes the 1990’ Russia as a country at war. “People were falling or jumping out of trains and windows. They choked to death in cabins with broken stoves or in houses with locked doors. A car racing through a calm street hit them, or it hit a group of people on the pavement. They drowned when they drove their car into a lake, ignored the traffic signs or just for no specific reason. They got poisoned by alcohol, adulterated alcohol, a substitute of alcohol or they overdosed. They died of heart attacks or strokes at an absurdly young age.”

“This is what a civil war looks like. It’s not about everyone carrying guns. It’s about people dying everywhere,” Gessen says.

Croatia went through a civil war during the Balkan conflict in the early 1990’s. Mexico went through it after a war against drug gangs was declared in 2006. Regarding the structure of unnatural deaths, these countries differ from Russia of the 1990s. As for the number of deaths, it was much higher in Russia.

In Croatia in 1991, at the peak of the war, the total external mortality rate for males reached 2.4 dead to 1000 living men. In Mexico in the worst year so far, the external mortality was surprisingly low, only 1.1. For comparison, the current external mortality in the Czech Republic is only 0.1 lower. It is because the war in Mexico is raging almost entirely in areas bordering with the United States, not in the whole country of 200 million. At the peak of the crisis in 1994, Russia reached the rate of 4.2 dead to 1000 living. That is 2.5 times more than in Croatia during the war and almost 4 times more than in Mexico.

Russia is suffering from all the crucial external causes of death: violent deaths, wars, suicides, alcohol poisoning, drug overdoses and traffic accidents. With one exception – the number of war victims in Croatia in 1991–1992 – the situation in Russia, compared to both these countries, is worse in all respects. Russia therefore faced an actual catastrophe comparable to a civil war.

Putin, the saviour?

In 2006, in the middle of his second term in office, Vladimir Putin said that the population decline was Russia’s biggest problem. A year later, he introduced a contribution of 250,000 roubles (150,000 Czech crowns) for mothers who would bear at least two children.

At the beginning of his presidential campaign in April 2011, he continued his reform. “First, I believe life expectancy will increase to 71 years. Second, I want the birth rate to increase by 25 to 30 per cent in comparison with 2006,” Putin promised to the members of the State Duma. According to his calculations, population programmes should cost 1.5 billion roubles (900 billon Czech crowns). He set the deadline to 2015.

Meanwhile, the life expectancy returned to the rate from the “alcohol free” end of the 1980’s and is slowly exceeding it. Even the population stopped dying out and in the last two years, the Russian statistics bureau announced a positive balance: more new-borns than deceased. The fertility rate exceeds that of the European Union. Premature mortality decreased.

Last year’s data show that Putin will almost certainly keep his promises. But this does not mean that the huge investments into population programmes have proven effective.

The improvement need not be a result of subsidies. It is more probably caused by a peak of the demographic curve which is currently resonating with the strong post-war generations. But that will pass in a few years. Today’s average age of a Russian mother is 28.6 years, which corresponds to the year of birth in 1986. As the population pyramid indicates, this is the second strongest year in the post-war Russia. The strong generation will reach its peak next year; after that, there will be the weak generation of the 1990’s.

“In the next ten or twenty years, the number of potential parents will drop drastically,” Russian demographer Sergei Zakharov explained last year in the Slate magazine. “We do have a higher life expectancy, but statistically, more people will be dying now. There is only a small chance we will keep this population until the half of the century.” The UN’S population prognosis comes to the same conclusion. It predicts that Russia’s population will decline from the current 143 million to 116 million in 2050.

Second, high mortality rate is still looming large in Russia. The natural mortality rate has dropped, but it is still three times higher than that of the Czech Republic. Alcoholism remains one of the crucial problems. Furthermore, with the destabilisation of Afghanistan, Russia has a new enemy. “Apart from alcohol and cigarettes, Russian society tends to abuse drugs a lot,” says the political geographer Romancov. “And since the beginning of this century, Afghan heroin has presented a new problem for the Russians.” It comes mainly from the post-Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and according to the UN estimates, two thirds of the illegal substance are smuggled through them into Europe. Russia is turning from a transit country into one of the consumers.

Reforms that would help the Russian society are largely unpopular and the Kremlin is not willing to launch them for now. “Voices calling for raising the prices of alcohol are louder and louder,” explains Dorazín. “After the 1980’s, when alcohol was unavailable, and the 1990’s, when it was at least expensive, the situation has now changed. Salaries are higher and alcohol is available to almost anyone, which is a problem. But Putin said that while he’s in charge, prices of alcohol will never rise.”

The Russian president will also veto another proposal – increasing the state pension age. Were it to be passed, it would get close to the life expectancy curve and a majority of Russians would not live long enough to retire. And that is something Putin will not accept, because his popularity would suffer.

One third of salary for food

“Russians love Putin because he turned them into consumers. Their living standard has been increasing not too quickly, but steadily,” describes Romancov the developments in the new century. “But that’s also his weakness, because now he has to keep making sure that Russians will be well off.”

Russians consume a lot of alcohol. But what else do average Russians spend their salaries on? And what is the structure of their expenditures compared to a poor Indian, a Czech person or a wealthy German?

A third of their salaries goes to food, which is also true of India. This may sound strange, because high costs of food are more typical of poorer countries, but the current economic sanctions are raising the prices of groceries. Another 6 % of their salaries are spent on alcohol.

Low housing costs are due partly to low energy prices, partly to regulated rent from the era of central planning.

Russians spend as much money on cars as they do on alcohol. The cause of this are large distances between cities and low population density, as well as poorly functioning public transport.

Russia is growing, Russians are dying

Ethnically, in 1992 there were 82 % of Russians and 18 % of non-Russian minorities in Russia. This proportion has officially not changed substantially in the last twenty years. But the streets look different. “For example in Moscow, the influx of immigrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus is apparent,” Dorazín says. “Typical immigrants are from Tajikistan, work manually or sweep the streets. Unlike ethnic Russians, they usually have a large family.”

Russia’s “melting pot” is currently the Far East. Here the original ethnic groups mix with the Chinese immigrants. “The Chinese are moving to Russia to pursue business or to get married,” Dorazín explains. Unlike in China, they can have as many children as they want in Russia. Russians are learning Chinese en masse, there is a lot of construction agencies, and mutual business is flourishing.” At the same time, this is not a popular political issue. “Russians do not talk about the Chinese in Siberia and you probably won’t find them in the statistics,” Dorazín says.

“Russian commentators agree that sooner or later, ethnic conflict will erupt in this area; or rather sooner than later. But nobody really wants to deal with it. The Chinese need Russian raw materials and Russians need Chinese money, so the relationships are good at the moment.”

As mentioned several times above, the ethnic Russians face the problem of low fertility rate. On the other hand, in areas where the ethnic Russians are in minority, fertility rate is the highest in the whole Russia: the Caucasus, the Altai Republic, Tuva or Bashkortostan. Most of these countries are also Muslim, whereas ethnic Russians are mostly Orthodox Christians.

Russians are the second fastest dying-out ethnic group in their country, surpassed only by the Russian Jewish community. They have been substituted by minorities: the Ingush, Chechens, Ossetians, Tuvans, Tatars or Bashkirs. North Caucasian ethnic groups have a three times higher fertility rate than ethnic Russians.

The result of these developments is ethnic tension, lately supported by a new wave of Russian nationalism. “Typical Russians identify themselves with the Russian nation, Russian ethnicity and the Orthodox Church,” says Romancov. “They are afraid of Muslims, especially the Caucasian ones.”

Ethnic tension has been further escalated by long-time immigration. In the 1990’s, when the population fell by 13 million children, they were replaced by an influx of workers from the neighbouring countries. But these were mostly from non-Russian ethnic groups.

The ethnic Russians who had colonised the neighbouring countries and now returned to Russia, have been the only exception among the immigrants. The colonisation of the Russian sphere of influence started as early as the Tsardom of Russia, but for a long time, Russian pioneers were not allowed to come back to the country. After the fall of the Soviet Union, millions of ethnic Russians have been returning from the colonies. The Kremlin would like to set them back on the road – to colonise Siberia or the Far East. But these new immigrants prefer Moscow or Saint Petersburg.

Another immigration wave is coming from Ukraine. The estimates indicate there is almost a million Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Two and a half million Ukrainians did not even have to move to Russia, because Russia moved to them, to Crimea.

At the same time, a part of Russians are moving in the other direction. According to the blog written by Vojtěch Boháč, a young political scientist the contemporary immigration wave is the second largest one in the last hundred years, surpassed only by the mass flight after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. “The main problem is, of course, the brain drain from Russia”, sociologist Anatoly Antonov commented on the immigrant wave two years ago. “We are losing the young Russia we could be forming here.”

Another decline in sight

Last Sunday, Russian state TV Rossija broadcast a 2.5 hour document on the fifteen years of Putin’s rule. In the document, the president said that stopping the population from dying out has been his biggest success.

In his era, certain suicidal trends of the 1990’s were actually stopped. The life expectancy exceeded the 1980’s numbers and Russian women started to have babies again. But Putin is not willing to solve Russia’s biggest problem – alcoholism.

It is highly probable that after a short spell of relief, Russia is going to get into serious troubles again. It has to deal with the fact that the generations devastated by the demographic Yeltsin-era catastrophe have been reaching their parenting age. Furthermore, there is a growing wave of Russian nationalism and escalating tension between Russians and other nations and nationalities living in Russia. The current, seemingly unfailing popularity of the Russian president, built on the story of the scary 1990’s and him saving the nation, may well start to crumble soon.

“We will see how long Putin will withstand the pressure,” says the geographer Romancov. “Maybe for quite a long time. The Russians now got what they are used to. An enemy.”

Sources: Goskomstat, Goskomstat - 2010 census, WHO - causes of death, Czech Statistical Office - Population, time series, OECD - Final consumption expenditure of households, Wikipedia - Demographics of Russia

Marcel Šulek, Jan Boček Sdílet na Facebooku Sdílet na Twitteru Sdílet na LinkedIn Tisknout Kopírovat url adresu Zkrácená adresa Kopírovat do schránky Zavřít