Russian President Vladimir Putin wants large families to become the norm in Russia again. “In the past, most Russian families, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, had seven, eight or even more children,” the Kremlin chief told the World Council of the Russian People in late November, calling on Russian youth to have more children.
During Vladimir Putin’s 25-year term, Russia’s population not only did not grow, but decreased by about 6.5 to 7 million people, according to independent demographic researcher Alexei Raksha. It should be noted that the current president claimed power in 2000 promising to stop the shrinking population.
If we include Crimea, the Russian population today is about 140 million, the Russian researcher told the German news agency (dpa) in Moscow. Unfortunately the Russian population is still steadily declining. If this trend continues, the population will shrink by an additional 3 million by 2030, predicts Alexei Raksha.
However, the data are not enough to fully describe the demographic problem in Russia. For years the country has benefited from migration flows from poorer former Soviet republics in central Asia, such as Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. After the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea on the Black Sea in 2014, an additional 2.5 million residents were added. Without these population “injections” the population limitation would be even greater. According to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, the annexation of four Ukrainian regions of Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhia added another 5 million people to Russian territory.
Income inequalities and desertification
An aging and shrinking population is disastrous for Russia. The country’s workforce is already insufficient to meet current needs. Inequality in the distribution of income leads, in addition, to the desertification of entire regions, especially in the north and east of the country, in the vast expanses of Siberia.
On average, a Russian woman gives birth to fewer than two children. However, Vladimir Putin is by no means a role model. While he calls for seven or eight children per family, he himself has just two. But there have been periods in the Kremlin chief’s tenure in which he has recorded successes in the battle against population decline thanks to higher wages and greater social security. In addition, the Russian government took targeted measures until about 2015, creating new kindergartens, improving the health system, and fighting alcoholism and smoking.
In recent years, Putin’s bigotry has put the focus of his policy more on the annexation of territories and less on improving the standard of living of Russians. The war against Ukraine, which began almost two years ago, forces hundreds of thousands of young people to fight on various fronts, with significant loss of human life, while driving many Russians, together with their families, abroad in search of a better and safer life. It is estimated that more than one million Russians are temporarily or permanently outside the country, although there are no reliable statistics on exiled citizens.
Every year the population shrinks by 500,000
The grandiose idealism of the Russian president, as well as the Kremlin’s strategy of returning to “traditional values” and the “traditional family” could not, however, stop the birth control in Russia. So the Kremlin tried, under pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church, to restore and establish “traditional family values” with laws against homosexuals and other sexual minorities. In Russian society, the forced conclusion of heterosexual relationships, as well as the procreation of children, has a long tradition. For years, the country has received international criticism from human rights organizations.
According to Alexei Raksha, the Russian population will decrease by 500,000 people this year alone. At the same time, due to the expansionist strategy of the Russian leadership, Russia has lost much of its attractiveness for economic migrants from neighboring countries. Two years ago, Vladimir Putin called population decline one of the biggest challenges. Unfortunately, the war in Ukraine has exacerbated the demographic problem in Russia.
Source: German wave
