Russia, the sick man of Europe.

THE Russian Federation today is in the grip of a steadily tightening mesh of serious demographic problems, for which the term "crisis" is no overstatement. This crisis is altering the realm of the possible for the country and its people--continuously, directly, and adversely. Russian social conditions, economic potential, military power, and international influence are today all subject to negative demographic constraints--and these constraints stand only to worsen over the years immediately ahead.

Russia is now at the brink of a steep population decline--a peacetime hemorrhage framed by a collapse of the birth rate and a catastrophic surge in the death rate. The forces that have shaped this path of depopulation and debilitation are powerful ones, and they are by now deeply rooted in Russian soil. Altering Russia's demographic trajectory would be a formidable task under any circumstances. As yet, unfortunately, neither Russia's political leadership nor the voting public that sustains it have even begun to face up to the enormous magnitude of the country's demographic challenges.

Negative population growth

On New Year's Day 1992--one week after the dissolution of the Soviet Union--Russia's population was estimated to be 148.7 million. As of mid 2004, according to the Russian State Statistics Committee (Goskomstat), the Russian Federation's population was 143.8 million. During its first eleven and a half years of post-Communist independence, Russia's population had apparently declined by almost five million people, or over 3 percent.

In proportional terms, this was by no means the largest population loss recorded during that period. According to estimates and projections by the U.N. Bureau of the Census, over a dozen states with a million people or more experienced a population decline between mid 1992 and mid 2004, 11 of these amounting to drops of 3.1 percent or more. Unlike some of these drops, however--Bosnia, for example, whose population total fell almost 10 percent--Russia's decline could not be explained by war or violent upheaval. In other places, population decline was due entirely to emigration (Armenia, Kazakhstan), or nearly so (Georgia). Russia, by contrast, had absorbed a substantial net influx of migrants during those years--a total net addition of over 5.5 million newcomers was tabulated between the territory's Soviet-era January 1989 census and its October 2002 population count.