Russia’s vanishing act Sociologist Salavat Abylkalikov on how migration shifts and underinvestment in motherhood drive a looming population crisis in Russia
Russia is no stranger to radical population shifts, and today’s demographic crisis belongs as much to the nation’s history as the global decline in birth rates. The conflict in Ukraine has contributed to high male mortality, but the war’s broader demographic impact isn’t yet clear. Rising life expectancy, higher levels of emigration, and a downturn in migrant worker inflows have created conditions that lead some scholars to project a mass vanishing of Russians by the end of the century. The country could have as few as 90 million people left, down from today’s 146 million inhabitants. In the worst-case scenario, the population could fall as low as 57 million. Meduza’s Sultan Suleimanov spoke with sociologist Salavat Abylkalikov, an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the University of Regensburg, about how Russia’s current demographic catastrophe is expected to transform the country by 2100. Meduza summarizes their conversation, available here, in English.
As in much of the world, Russia’s birth rate fell below the replacement level long ago. According to Salavat Abylkalikov, each new generation in modern Russia is roughly 25–30 percent smaller than the previous one. Barring some “fantastic breakthrough” in prolonging life, the country now relies on immigration to avoid population decline.
Today, migration to Russia primarily comes from Central Asia and the South Caucasus, mirroring the typical pattern of people moving from poorer to wealthier nations. In the 1990s, however, the USSR’s collapse led to the mass repatriation of Russian-speaking populations and deported North Caucasus peoples, bringing in large numbers even as Moscow lost its Soviet empire.
“We had neighboring territories that belonged to the same large country as us — places with strong Russian language skills, high educational standards, and common historical and cultural ties,” Abylkalikov told Meduza, arguing that Moscow failed to “appreciate this resource sufficiently.” Today, he warns that Russia risks losing its migration advantage, due partly to anti-migrant sentiment but mainly to economic trends. “The economic development gap between Russia and Central Asian countries is narrowing,” Abylkalikov explained, pointing out that Kazakhstan, for example, now boasts a marginally higher per capita GDP than Russia. “Why go all the way to Russia for roughly the same paycheck?”
Look at what happened with Moldova. You used to see tons of ads [in Russia] for “Moldovan construction workers” and stuff like that. But over time, people from Moldova started going to the European Union instead. At first, it was small: only a third went west, two-thirds came to Russia. Then it flipped: two-thirds went west, a third to Russia. Now the flow to Russia has basically disappeared. The exact same thing could happen with all our other neighboring areas — the South Caucasus and Central Asia — just like it did with those former western Soviet republics.
Besides Europe, Russia’s labor market will face increasing competition from China, where continued economic growth and population decline will draw more workers from Southeast and Central Asia, Abylkalikov told Meduza.
Even as Russia loses its appeal to migrants, some parts of the country will likely remain attractive and benefit from younger populations. “Islands of demographic well-being” will persist, sustained in the short term by birth rates that are still falling but more slowly than in the rest of Russia. In the decades ahead, the places with the most promising outlook are the major metropolitan areas that can still attract both foreign and domestic migration.
Referring to Moscow’s annexations in Ukraine and increased secrecy in national record-keeping, Abylkalikov also pointed out that at least two “non-conventional demographic components” are relevant to Russia’s case: border changes and statistical accounting irregularities. “It appears that the Russian government, recognizing its difficulties with traditional demographic mechanisms, has decided to employ these unconventional methods as well,” he said.
These tactics aside, “the only viable approach to stabilizing birth rates or achieving modest increases likely requires massive, enormous financial investment,” argued Abylkalikov. “Most crucially, it means building maternal infrastructure.”
Russia’s child-rearing environment has suffered repeated shocks in the past century, leading to a “chain of demographic cycles.” Due to World War II, fewer children were born in the 1940s than expected, resulting in a generation that was notably smaller than anticipated. This sequence repeated itself in the 1990s, when the transition from communism led women to delay or forgo having children. The state’s pronatalist interventions have also had an impact on these cycles. Soviet demographic policies under Mikhail Gorbachev meant that “some births that could have happened in the ‘90s actually took place a little earlier.” The Kremlin’s policies in the mid-to-late 2010s had a similar effect, particularly as uncertainty about the future of “maternity capital” programs influenced family planning.
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The war in Ukraine has killed more than 200,000 soldiers, according to conservative estimates by Meduza, Mediazona, and the BBC. Despite this shock to Russia’s supply of men, the wider demographic repercussions remain unclear, Abylkalikov told Meduza:
It’s a pretty complicated and ambiguous issue. Yes, some men who could’ve been fathers either left the country, got killed, or were badly wounded — and that could hurt birth rates. But for some people, this actually had a positive effect. The payments to drafted soldiers, military contractors, and even death benefits are quite substantial. That money started flowing into really struggling localities — rural places and small towns that were falling apart. And they were suddenly flooded with cash that will circulate for some time. […] These processes likely balanced each other out, and birth rates didn’t fall as sharply as they could have.
While Russia’s casualties in Ukraine haven’t been the demographic shock many expected, Abylkalikov said Moscow’s military spending constitutes a perhaps more significant loss. If the country wants to raise its birth rates, it will need to ensure that “each new child is a source of joy rather than hardship,” which requires enormous financial expenditures. Instead, Russia is burning those resources on a war. In recent years, the authorities have sought to encourage parenthood in part by restricting abortion access and banning “child-free propaganda.” According to Abylkalikov, such coercive policies and even token measures of persuasion will fail without public investments on the scale of a major war.
Interview by Sultan Suleimanov
Summary by Kevin Rothrock