World War II Continues to Have Demographic Impact on Russia

The periodic increases and current decrease in the number of births in Russia reflects the third echo of World War II, Anatoly Vishnevsky says, with the low number of births in 1943 leading to demographic declines approximately every 25 years thereafter. The current decline is almost precisely 75 years – three such cycles – since that time.

And each fall is deeper and each rise smaller than its predecessor, the Higher School of Economics demographer says, because of the growing preference for smaller families, a trend that multiplies the effect of the rises and falls in the number of women in prime child-bearing cohorts (iz.ru/612611/elena-loriia/rost-rozhdaemosti-nachnetsia-cherez-15-let-i-prodolzhitsia-do-serediny-veka).

In an interview given to Izvestiya, Vishnevsky suggests that Russia’s “main demographic problem is not a low number of births but a high number of deaths,” something he says that health ministry figures “do not reflect,” in part because focusing on this is unwelcome and requires policy choices the regime doesn’t appear to want to make.