The biggest drop since the fall of the Soviet regime in 1991, major concerns among economists
Russia lost one million inhabitants in 2021 due to Covid and lower and lower birth rates. This was certified by Rosstat, the national statistical institute responsible for demographic censuses. It is the largest decline since the fall of the Soviet regime in 1991 and is causing great concern among economists, who see the country’s economic recovery and future threatened.
According to official data, the pandemic has so far caused the deaths of 660,000 people in Russia, aggravating a demographic decline that has been going on for many years. By 2019, the Russian population had already fallen by half a million, a figure that doubled in just 12 months. It should be noted that the data relating to deaths from Covid published by Rosstat are different from those released by the government, which tend to diminish the impact of the pandemic and consider victims of the virus only those patients for whom the infection is established as the main cause of death after an autopsy.
But Rosstat’s data should be the closest to reality. The vaccination campaign has been slow with Sputnik V, a vaccine initially considered unsafe. The confinement measures were limited to the essentials and people used the masks listlessly. The victims of the pandemic have significantly aggravated the demographic crisis, fueled by low birth rates and short life expectancy, lower than that of all European countries. The number of births for each woman is still on average at 1.5, far below the 2.1 considered essential to compensate for deaths. There are also fewer children because today’s parents were born in the 1990s, when the birth rate plummeted due to political and economic uncertainties following the fall of the Soviet Union.
In the annual press conference last December, President Vladimir Putin reiterated that a population of 146 million is not enough for the country from a geopolitical point of view, also because the low birth rate recorded in the last thirty years is beginning to cause a worrying shortage of manpower. Ever since he was in the Kremlin, Putin has kept repeating that “it is a joy to have children” and that “there is no greater happiness in life and in the world”, and has encouraged births with cash bonuses and low-cost mortgages. However, his campaign produced only one result: couples who wish to have a child have it immediately after marriage, increasing the distance between one generation and another without solving the problem.
The standard of living in Russia has steadily deteriorated since 2014, due to Western sanctions, excessive dependence on oil and gas and rampant corruption. More than one in three Russians are unable to save anything and consumption has plummeted. “If people don’t save money, they can’t plan the future of the family,” demography expert Sergei Zakharov told France Press. Measures to increase the birth rate encourage families to have children earlier, but they do not change the total number of children they want ”.
Births are decreasing year after year in more than 20 developed countries around the world, including Italy. Experts calculate that within a few decades the Earth will have 10 billion inhabitants against the current seven, but that then a rapid decline will begin due to the fact that even in the most populated areas, such as Africa, India and China, women they will have greater access to education and contraception. Perhaps the world will be saved from the devastating overpopulation of specimens of the human species, but the problem in every country will become the excessive number of elderly compared to the young, a condition that compromises social relations and economic development.
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