Russian demography

Gradually plodding through the 700 pages of text of reference 2, the purchase of which was noticed at reference 1, getting on for a month ago now. Not a bad read, on which I shall report more fully in due course, but overall rather depressing, with far too much of what one might have thought of as the developed & educated part of the world's time and treasure continuing to be devoted to arms and conflict.

But I was struck this afternoon by Kennedy's observations - from shortly before the break-up of the Soviet Union - about the its peculiar demographics - now largely transferred to Russia. So I took a look at Wikipedia.

So Russia has around 140m people, a bit more than Japan and about twice as many as us. People with a curious age distribution, as illustrated above. Much more jagged than the comparable graphic for this country, or indeed most other western European countries. I dare say in some large part the result of their horrific losses in the Great Patriotic War (our second world war).

Life expectancy of women is around 75 and of men around 65. This last figure also very low compared with most other western European countries, apparently only partly accounted for by their very high rates of alcohol and tobacco consumption. They also have a high rate of violent death and a high rate of suicide, although I don't know how large these two items figure in the totals.

Deaths have regularly exceeded births in recent years, despite periodic drives by the authorities to push up birth rates, with the natural decrease presently running at around 500,000 a year. Some of this is made up for by inward migration, mostly temporary, from the Ukraine and the the south eastern fringes. As here, migrants tend to get the dirty jobs which Russians don't want - which, as here, does not stop the Russians resenting their presence. And, as here, a political issue there.

There used to be a lot more abortions than births, more than double, but from around 1990 things started to change, and now there are a lot less, less than half as many.

Ethnic makeup less of an issue than it might have been when Kennedy was writing, when the Soviet Union had a much larger Muslim population than Russia has now, then set to become the majority. Whereas now, Russians account for four fifths of the total.

PS: while the world as a whole might spend a depressingly large amount on arms and conflict, Kennedy argues that some countries, particularly Japan, do not pull their weight in that department, being content to shelter under the US umbrella, more or less for free.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/another-graphic.html.

Reference 2: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers - Paul Kennedy - 1987.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia.