Demographic Losses of Russia | After the Collapse of the USSR
After the collapse of the USSR, the demographic losses of Russia amounted to 25 million people
December 26, 30 years ago, was the last day of the existence of the USSR. Russian President Vladimir Putin called the collapse of the Union the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. He increasingly began to state problems with demographics. Decline in the birth rate in the mid-1990s. he compared with the situation in 1943-1944, speaking at the investment forum "Russia is calling!" November 30th. “146 million for such a vast territory is completely insufficient: we don’t have enough workers!” - Putin said at the big final press conference on December 23.
Title: Demographic Losses of Russia After the Collapse of the USSR
Introduction:
30 years ago, on December 26, the USSR ceased to exist, and Russian President Vladimir Putin regarded it as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Since then, Russia has faced challenges with its demographics, particularly a decline in the birth rate in the mid-1990s. Putin, during the "Russia is calling!" investment forum on November 30th, compared the birth rate situation to that of the challenging years of 1943-1944, emphasizing the need for a larger workforce. As of December 23, in a big final press conference, he stressed that the country's population of 146 million on such a vast territory was insufficient. Consequently, Russia's demographic losses over the past three decades, excluding the excess deaths due to the COVID-19 pandemic, reached a staggering 25.3 million people, making it the most significant demographic decline in the nation's history.
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Conclusion:
The demographic losses experienced by Russia in the wake of the USSR's collapse have had significant implications for the nation's workforce and overall population. Vladimir Putin's concerns about the declining birth rate have shed light on the importance of addressing demographic challenges and finding solutions to ensure a prosperous future for the country. Understanding the role of search robots and optimizing online content for search engines is equally vital for businesses and content creators to reach a broader audience and maintain a strong online presence in this digital age. As Russia continues to grapple with its demographic situation, ongoing efforts in various domains are essential to shape a more sustainable and thriving future.
The data department of Vedomosti assessed the demographic situation in the country using long-term forecasts of the USSR State Statistics Committee. Without taking into account the excess losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic (1 million citizens), the demographic losses of the population (excessive mortality plus a decrease in the birth rate) over three decades amounted to 25.3 million people and turned out to be the most significant in the history of Russia (see "How We Counted") .
Demographics of the Soviet Union
According to data from the 1989 Soviet census, the population of the USSR was 70% East Slavs, 17% Turkic peoples, and all other ethnic groups below 2%. Alongside the atheist majority of 60% there were sizable minorities of Russian Orthodox Christians (approximately 20%) and Muslims (approximately 15%).
DEMOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE USSR AND RUSSIA IN THE MIRROR OF GENERATIONS
Anatoly VISHNEVSKY
INIn the mid-1920s, when Stalin took the first steps to consolidate his power, neither the USSR nor Russia had a well-established modern system of demographic statistics yet. Nevertheless, at that time quite rich information about all the main demographic processes was already collected and processed, albeit not everywhere, in 1926 one of the best Soviet population censuses was carried out, all available data were widely published and carefully analyzed, demographic forecasts were developed , demographic studies were on the rise. Next to demographers who gained fame even before the revolution (V. Mikhailovsky, P. Kurkin, S. Novoselsky), younger M. Ptukha, V. Paevsky, Yu. Korchak-Chepurkovsky, S. Tomilin, A. Khomenko and others worked.
In 1953, after the death of the leader, the information field of demographic statistics and the research field of demography were a scorched desert.
Already in the early 1930s, the classification of demographic information was in full swing, gradually turning into its falsification. In particular, the population census of 1937 was declared "wrecking", and in 1939 a new census was carried out, the results of which were more suitable for the country's leadership. Both demographic institutions were liquidated - Leningrad in 1934, Kiev - in 1939. Demographic publications have almost disappeared. Brutal repression fell upon the demographers themselves.
V. Paevsky, the leading figure of the Leningrad Demographic Institute, died in 1934 at the age of 41 from a heart attack a few hours after the decision to close the institute was made. At the end of the 1930s, three successive heads of the state statistical service, V. Osinsky, I. Kraval, and I. Vermenichev, were arrested and shot in a short time. The execution ended the life of O. Kvitkin, head of the 1926 and 1937 population censuses, and Ukrainian demographer A. Khomenko. Another head of the census, 1937 L. Brangendler, died in the camp. M. Ptukha, Yu. Korchak-Chepurkovsky, B. Smulevich, M. Tratsevsky, A. Merkov, M. Kurman went through arrest, prisons and camps...
The concealment of information about demographic processes in the USSR has reached an unthinkable limit. Even the total population of the country was not known. Only in 1959 - 6 years after Stalin's death and 20 years after the census - of the population of 1939 - a new census was carried out, thanks to which the statisticians felt something like stable ground under their feet and were able to calculate the necessary demographic indicators. It is the results of the 1959 census and their comparison with the results of the 1926 census that make it possible to judge the demographic results of Stalin's rule. What are these results?
Fertility: the great turning point
At the beginning of the 20th century, Russia was a country with a very high birth rate. During the First World War and the Civil War, the birth rate, for obvious reasons, declined, but by the mid-1920s, the life of the population, then, predominantly peasant, in Russia, Ukraine, and other regions of the USSR, returned to normal, and the pre-war high birth rate was restored. But this post-war rise did not last long, by the end of the 1920s a strong decline was already noticeable, which accelerated sharply after 1929 - Stalin's "year of the great turning point".
Having reached the maximum depth of decline in 1934, after a terrible famine, in 1935-1937 the birth rate in Russia increased slightly again, but never returned to the level that existed before 1933. In 1935, when Stalin uttered his famous words that “life has become happier” and “the birth rate is greater, and the net increase is incomparably greater,” the total fertility rate in Russia was almost 40% lower than in 1927. As for the natural increase, it was almost twice as low as in 1927 (11‰ against 21‰).
The decline in the birth rate in a country that has embarked on the path of industrialization and urbanization is a natural process. What is striking about the Stalinist USSR is the enormous rate of decline in the birth rate. In order for the demographic behavior of entire generations to change almost instantly, people had to experience an incredible shock. Such a shock was the events of the late 1920s and early 1930s for the majority of the population of the USSR: forced collectivization, dispossession and famine. In a sense, this shock was much stronger than the shock of the First World War and the Civil War, the revolution and the post-revolutionary devastation. After they ended, the population quickly returned to the old norms of demographic and family behavior, while the shock of the early 1930s led to irreversible changes.
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Frightened by this unexpected consequence of his economic and social policy, Stalin tried to extend the mechanism of repression to this area of life of the citizens of the USSR. A few months after he announced with great fanfare, but without any foundation, that the population of the USSR "began to multiply much faster than in the old days," abortion was banned in the country.
Sources: Russia 1927 - 1940; 1950 - 1958 - assessment by Andreev and co-authors; Ukraine for 1925 - 1929 - calculation by M.V. Birds; Russia 2 - (1950 - 1958) and Ukraine for the same years - A. Blum's assessment.
The years immediately following the ban on abortion were marked by some rise in birth rates, but this was small and short-lived. The abortion ban did not bring the expected effect, and then the war caused a new sharp decline in the birth rate, and Stalin decided to tighten the screws even more. At the end of the war, in 1944, a decree was issued that raised the status of a registered marriage and made it more difficult to dissolve it. On the other hand, at the same time, an attempt was made to increase the prestige of motherhood by introducing government awards to mothers of large families and providing them with a number of benefits.
Judging by the fact that the measures taken could not stop the decline in the birth rate, the strengthening of the state presence in family affairs turned out to be an ineffective remedy. Moreover, it is precisely the countries that survived totalitarian regimes that tried to influence the family and demographic behavior of people (Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, etc.) that are already demonstrating the deepest decline in fertility in our time. Perhaps this is due to the fact that state intervention in any form - both with the help of a stick and with the help of a carrot - does not increase the forces of family self-organization, but reduces them.
From 1925 to 2000, the total fertility rate in Russia decreased by 5.59 children per woman (from 6.80 to 1.21) (Fig. 2.). Of these, 3.97 children, or 71% of the total decline falls on the years 1925-1955 - the "Stalin era".
Mortality: no fracture
According to official estimates, the overall mortality rate for the USSR as a whole was 29.1‰ in 1913, 20.3‰ in 1926, and by 1930, according to Stalin's statement about a 36% reduction in mortality, fell to 18-19 ‰. Even greater successes were reported 5 years later, after the end of the terrible famine. In 1935, the death rate was 56% of the 1913 level 1 , that is, it had already decreased by 44%, or to about 16‰.
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Many years had to pass before the researchers got to the secret archives and, on the basis of all available data, came to the conclusion that the overall mortality rate of the population of the USSR in 1930 was not 18-19, but 27‰; and in 1935 its value was, accordingly, not 16, but about 21‰. Approximately the same as in the USSR was then the overall mortality rate in Russia (27.3‰ in 1930 and 23.6 in 1935) (Fig. 3).
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* Large dotted line - trend line 1890-1913
Sources: Population of the USSR 1987. Statistical compendium. M., 1988, p. 127; Rashin A.G. Population of Russia for 100 years. M., 1956, p. 156; Andreev E., Darsky L., Kharkova T. Population of the Soviet Union. 1922-1991. M., 1993, p. 120; Andreev E., Darsky L., Kharkova T. Demographic history of Russia: 1927-1959. M., 1998, p. 164.
Now let's see how things stood with infant mortality, about which Stalin, speaking in 1930 at the 16th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, said that it had decreased by 42.5%. If this were true, then by 1930 the infant mortality rate would have fallen to 155 per 1,000 newborns, which, according to later estimates by demographers, was 196 per 1,000 2 , that is, only 27% less than in 1913 - (then in the first year of life in Russia 269 died out of every thousand born). In Russia at that time, the rate was higher than the all-Union one and amounted to 227 per 1000.
According to calculations, it turns out that the mortality rate - both general and infant - in 1930 was indeed lower than in 1913. Why was Stalin not satisfied with the true assessment of these successes, albeit a more modest one? The answer is related to two circumstances.
Firstly, the death rate was already declining before the revolution, so its moderate decline could in no way be attributed to the merits of the Soviet government. Moreover, mortality rates in the 1930s were significantly higher than would be expected if pre-revolutionary trends persisted - all of them are above the trend line of 1890-1913 (see Fig. 3).
Secondly, although the indicators of 1930 were better than the pre-war ones, they were worse than those achieved in 1927-1928, before the start of the implementation of the main Stalinist projects.
Thus, already in 1930, the foundations were laid for that false mythology of the extraordinary successes of the Soviet government in protecting public health, which, it seems, has survived to this day.
Meanwhile, the dynamics of expected (average) life expectancy indicates an almost complete lack of progress "in the years of Stalin's five-year plans."
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As E. Andreev showed (Fig. 4), even if we take only the most favorable, "crisis-free" years of the interwar period, the life expectancy of women has risen noticeably higher than the pre-revolutionary level (by about 45 years), but men have no growth compared to the last practically non-existent in the pre-revolutionary years. The situation changed only after the war, and by 1953 the life expectancy of both men and women exceeded the best pre-war figures by about 20 years. However, this success was achieved mainly due to a decrease in mortality in childhood, which, in turn, was due to the emergence and mass introduction of antibiotics into practice. But the increase in life expectancy of the adult population was much more modest and short-lived, it stopped very soon,
Demographic catastrophes as the norm
Even those modest successes that actually took place refer only to the "normal" years, which in Stalin's time were constantly punctuated by catastrophic years.
Stalin's rule was marked by the largest military losses in the history of the country, primarily in the Second World War. Stalin did everything to hide their true scale.
The number of losses he named - "about seven million people" - was made public in February 1946, although, according to military historians, "at that time the country's leadership knew more accurate data - 15 million dead" 3 . But later these data turned out to be underestimated, and they had to be revised. According to the last Soviet official estimate given by M. Gorbachev in May 1990, the war took the lives of almost 27 million Soviet people. For the USSR, which had about 195 million people at the beginning of the war, this meant the loss of 14% of the pre-war population.
Stalin's assessment of the losses of the USSR in World War II was revised, but the mythology created by Stalin and his entourage of the inevitability of these losses persists to this day. And now it is considered good form to recall the heroism of the war years and hush up the question of the responsibility of the Generalissimo for the unpreparedness for war, for the mediocrity of military operations at its first stages, for the "expensive" method of obtaining victory at the cost of unimaginable human casualties.
Against the background of huge losses in World War II, 127 thousand irretrievable losses (and even 265 thousand wounded, shell-shocked, burned, frostbite, etc.) during the three and a half months of the war with Finland (December 1939 - March 1940) seem almost a trifle. But let's compare this trifle, which is also on Stalin's conscience, with, say, the losses in World War II of countries such as the United States (300-400 thousand according to various estimates) or England (350-450 thousand).
The second group of catastrophic demographic losses of the Stalin era is associated with famine. According to relatively recent estimates, in the USSR they amounted to 7-7.5 million, in Russia - 2.2 million people. But there was another famine, post-war. It was the result of the 1946 drought, began in December and continued until the 1947 harvest. According to some estimates, human losses as a result of this famine in the USSR amounted to about 1 million people.
The third source of catastrophic demographic losses, which has become almost a trademark of the entire Stalin era, is political repression .
The number of victims of repression, including the premature deaths caused by them, runs into the millions, but their exact number is still not known. A huge number of people were simply shot. According to the official information that once appeared, "in 1930-1953, on charges of counter-revolutionary, state crimes, judicial and all kinds of non-judicial bodies passed sentences and decisions against 3,778,234 people, of which 786,098 people were shot" 4 . At the same time, it is possible that this information underestimates the number of those executed.
"Besides, and we know this for sure, very many perished in camps and prisons without being sentenced to death" by a "court" 5 . The Gulag flourished in the 1930s, existed and replenished during the war years, and did not disappear even after it ended. Moreover, at the end of the war, mass repression intensified again and did not stop until 1953. The total number of prisoners in prisons, colonies and camps in the early 1950s approached 2.8 million people.
By this time, the first wave of mass Stalinist repressions - the "kulak exile " - had almost come to naught . The deportation of peoples became a new form of repression . The total number of Soviet citizens deported inside the USSR during the war and post-war years was approximately 2.75 million people.
It is known that the death rate in the camps, during the deportations, in the places of settlements of the deported was terribly high, so that the demographic losses here were much greater than from direct executions. According to D. Volkogonov, as a result of Stalinist repressions from 1929 to 1953, 21.5 million people died in the USSR. But so far this estimate can hardly be considered exhaustive or rigorously proven.
Years of wars, outbreaks of famine and the rise of mass repressions literally “flashed through” the “Stalin era”. Since 1929, there have been more of them than "normal", quiet years. Accordingly, it is not easy to separate the "normal" mortality, which can be discussed about the successes of health care, sanitary hygiene, medical achievements, etc., from the catastrophic mortality of people thrown back into almost primitive conditions. All this made itself felt later, when Stalin was no longer alive, there were no obvious demographic catastrophes, and the USSR and its core - Russia - stalled for a long time on the path along which other countries were triumphantly moving towards ever higher life expectancy. .
Demographic ruin
Falsifying demographic data is not an easy task. You can name any indicators of births or deaths and make them believe, but sooner or later they are subject to objective verification, because the population size depends on them, and hence the number of workers and eaters, soldiers and voters, schoolchildren and pensioners.
In the Stalinist USSR, this was possible. The population of the country has become a carefully guarded state secret, because its publication would immediately make obvious the many years of lies of the authorities and Stalin personally.
Before the veil of secrecy fell over the population, it was repeatedly falsified. In 1934, at the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Stalin named a fake figure for the population of the USSR - 168 million people. Based on it, Soviet experts expected that the 1937 population census would record 170-172 million people in the country. But only 162 million were taken into account 6. Not surprisingly, the 1937 census was declared sabotage, and a new census was conducted in 1939, and everything was done so that this time the census results confirmed the false statements of the country's leadership. The census was conducted in January 1939, and in March, even before its final results were received, speaking at the 18th Congress of the CPSU(b), Stalin declared that 170 million people lived in the country. Naturally, the results published subsequently could not be less than this figure declared by the leader.
Subsequent historical events - the inclusion in 1939 of the USSR of the Baltic countries, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, and then the war, pushed the question of the demographic results of the Soviet thirties into the background, and after the war, Stalin, apparently, given the not entirely successful experience of his pre-war falsifications, decided to stop publishing data on the population of the USSR altogether.
Even in the mid-1950s, numerous foreign researchers were still trying in vain to at least approximately estimate the number of inhabitants of one of the largest countries in the world. The French demographer A. Sauvy then gave a summary of such estimates from 213 to 220 million people in the middle of 1955. When, three years after Stalin's death, the official figure was first published, it turned out to be significantly lower than all available estimates: 200.2 million people in April 1956 7 .
Estimates of the demographic losses of the USSR by domestic specialists who gained access to archival materials became possible much later. According to these estimates, the number of excess deaths in 1927-1940 was 7 million, in 1941-1945 - 26-27 million 8 . But there were also direct losses from the famine of 1946-1947 (approximately 1 million people), as well as victims of the post-war Gulag. So the total direct losses of the Stalinist USSR are at least 35 million people, and, most likely, they are higher. And besides, one should take into account the significant reduction in the replenishment of the population due to children who were not born to prematurely dead.
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If we imagine that there were no two main demographic catastrophes of the Stalin period - the famine of the early 30s and the Second World War, as well as other rises in mortality that reduced the growth rate of the population of Russia, then, starting from 1926, the population due to the balance birth and death rates would grow as shown in Fig. 5.
In 1926, when Stalin was just coming into power, the population of Russia was 93 million people.
Until 1941, the country did not know major wars, and its population could grow to about 121 million people. In fact, in 1941 it was 9 million less - only 112 million. Only in 1935 was the population of 1930 restored - after the demographic failure of the times of collectivization and dispossession. Then a new terrible failure followed - the military one. The pre-war population of Russia was restored only in 1956 - 11 years after the end of the war and three years after Stalin's death.
Thus, for 15 years - more than half of the term of Stalin's rule - Russia lived in conditions of demographic losses that were not replenished even in comparison with the level already reached, i.e. being demographically pushed back.
By the time of Stalin's death, Russia's population was 107 million. If there were no excessive losses during the years of his reign, there could have been more than 40 million more Russians in 1953.
Anatoly VISHNEVSKY
Source: DEMOSCOPE-WEEKLY
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