“Where did all the flowers go?” asks the famous anti-war song of the 1960s. In Moscow today, the New York Times reports, the question is: Where have all the men gone? The answer to both questions is, in part, the same: In the soldiers’ cemeteries. But many of Moscow’s missing have also fled Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military for his war in Ukraine. In fact, demographers say Russia may not recover for generations, if ever. “Putin spent years racing against Russia’s demographic clock, only to order an invasion of Ukraine that sends his country’s population into historic decline,” reports Bloomberg News. Here’s a look at what demographer Alexei Raksha calls Russia’s “perfect storm” of demographic decline:
So where did all the young people go?
Putin says his recent mobilization has drawn up about 300,000 men, 82,000 of whom are already in Ukraine. Another 300,000 Russians are believed to have fled to other countries to avoid the camp. The Pentagon estimated in August, before Kiev’s fall counteroffensive, that Russia had suffered about 80,000 casualties in Ukraine, including wounded troops. “I feel like we’re a country of women now,” 33-year-old Moscow resident Stanislava told The Times. “I was looking for male friends to help me move some furniture and realized almost everyone was gone.” Aleksei Ermilov, founder of Russia’s Chop-Chop barbershop empire, tells the Times that “you can see the huge wave of relocation more in Moscow and St. Petersburg than in other cities, partly because more people have the means to leave.” . Urban professionals who could politely avoid thinking about war during the summer were rudely awakened when the Kremlin began pressuring them for military service. The ranks of “Moscow’s intelligentsia, often with disposable income and passports to travel abroad,” have “thinned out noticeably — in restaurants, in the hipster community and at social gatherings like dinners and parties,” the Times reported. But ethnic and religious minorities in some areas have it worse. The story continues In Russia’s far north and along the border with Mongolia, in the Sakha and Buryatia regions, mobilization rates are up to six times higher than in the European regions of Russia, according to Yekaterina Morland at the Asians of Russia Foundation . Natives in those areas “gathered in their villages” and recruiting officers scoured the tundra and “handed out summonses to whoever they came across,” Vladimir Budaev of the Free Buryatia Foundation told The Associated Press.
How did the male exodus affect Russian demography?
Russia already had a huge gender imbalance before the invasion of Ukraine, dating back to massive battlefield casualties in World War II, writes Paul Goble in the Eurasia Daily Monitor. Results from the 2021 census are expected to show that Russia has 10.5 million more women than men, almost the same gap as a decade ago – the double whammy is that Russian men of “prime reproductive age” are dying in Ukraine or they are leaving Putin. plan, which “will further reduce the already low birth rates in the Russian Federation and put the country’s already troubled demographic future at even greater risk.” “The mobilization is upsetting families at perhaps the toughest time for Russian demographics, with the number of women of childbearing age having fallen by about a third over the past decade” amid the country’s broader population decline, Bloomberg reports. “While demographic traumas typically unfold over decades, the aftermath of the invasion makes worst-case scenarios more likely—and much sooner than expected.” Continuing the war in Ukraine and mobilization efforts until the end of next spring would be “disastrous” for Russia, Moscow demographer Igor Efremov tells Bloomberg. It is likely to reduce birth rates to 1 million between mid-2023 and mid-2024, bringing the fertility rate down to 1.2 children per woman, a low that Russia has only reached once, in 1999-2000. “A fertility rate of 2.1 is needed to keep populations stable without immigration,” Bloomberg adds, and Russia is currently facing “immigration outflows” and serious questions about its “ability to attract workers from abroad.”
War is bad for Ukraine too, right?
Yes — and like Russia, Ukraine was already suffering demographically even before the invasion, Lyman Stone, a researcher at the conservative Institute for Family Studies, wrote in March. “Both Russia and Ukraine have low fertility rates, but in recent years, Russia has implemented prenatal policies that have helped the country avoid extreme fertility declines,” while Ukraine has been relatively lacking in such policies as it struggled to 15 years of war and political and economic turmoil. Given Russia’s much larger population and less severe recent population decline, “Ukraine’s position relative to Russia is steadily eroding,” and “this trend will continue at an even greater pace in the future as differences in fertility rates between of two countries are growing. “Stone predicts. But “key demographic factors such as birth rates and immigration rates,” while important, “are not destiny,” and Ukraine “turned demographic decline into military resurgence” through alliance-building and the “keen willingness” of Ukrainians to fight. Moreover, if Russia succeeds in annexing significant parts of Ukraine, Putin will have succeeded in increasing Russia’s population — but will also add Ukraine’s “adverse demographics” to his own problems, Bloomberg notes.
Could there be a Russian post-war baby boom?
It’s possible. Sometimes wars “lead to higher fertility,” such as when “sudden bursts of conception” occur as men are deployed for combat, Goble writes in the Eurasia Daily Monitor. “For example, monthly birth data from the 1940s clearly show that the US baby boom began not when GIs returned from war, but as they left for war.” After the fighting stops, he adds, “wars can trigger a wave of nationalist ideas that make people vulnerable to prenatal ideas and policies, even as so-called ‘replacement fertility’ often leads families to ‘respond’ to high-loss events . having ‘replacement’ children’. In the short term, however, “it is likely that in times of uncertainty, many couples will postpone childbearing for some time until the situation stabilizes,” says Elena Tsurilova, a researcher at the Higher School of Economics’ International Laboratory for Population and Health. Bloomberg. “In 2023, we are likely to see a further decline in the birth rate.” And meanwhile, “dating app downloads have increased significantly in countries where Russian men have fled,” the Times reports, noting sharp increases in downloads in Armenia, Georgia, Turkey and Kazakhstan. “All the sane guys are gone,” said Tatiana, a 36-year-old Muscovite. “The dating pool has shrunk by at least 50 percent.”
Is there a way for Russia to reverse its demographic spiral?
The most likely outcome is that “Putin’s war will cast a shadow over Russia for a long time to come—the longer the war goes on, the darker the war will get,” Goble writes. Not only will the loss of Russian men to immigration and death on the battlefield “leave a huge hole in Russian society,” but “those Russian men who do manage to return will face enormous problems,” from PTSD and other health struggles to participation in “Proliferation of crime waves similar to those that followed the war in Afghanistan and Chechnya.” Russia’s “population pyramid” shape means “the birth rate is almost destined to decline,” Brent Peabody wrote in Foreign Policy in January. Putin has said he is haunted by this fact and that “Russia’s need for more people is undoubtedly a motivation for its current aggressive stance toward Ukraine,” even as “the idea that Ukrainians will register as good Russians is largely delusional’. Ukrainians may not sign up to become good Russians willingly, but thousands of Ukrainian children have been taken to Russia to be placed with Russian “foster families,” the AP reports. Ukrainian authorities say they are opening a criminal case against Russia’s children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, who said in mid-October that she herself had adopted a full-sized boy from Russian forces in bombed-out Mariupol, Ukraine, AP reports . The US, Britain and other Western nations imposed sanctions on Lvova-Belova in September over allegations it masterminded the transfer to Russia of more than 2,000 vulnerable children from Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Demography, and making assumptions about how nations will respond to demographic changes, are not precise arts, Rhodes College professor Jennifer Sciubba wrote in the Population Reference Bureau in April. For example, “for years, a common argument in the US policy community was that Russia’s demographic problems would limit its ability to project power beyond its borders.” Apparently, the “geriatric theory of peace” did not sit well with Russia, Sciubba adds. But more generally, “population aging and shrinking are such new trends that we know little about how states conduct foreign policy under these conditions, and we should not expect aging states to act like aging individuals.”
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