One of the dramatic changes in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been the sharp decline in its population. In 1991, Russia’s population was about 148,543,000. Ten years later, as cited in Piotr Eberhardt’s book, Geografiia naseleniia Rossii, it declined to 145,174,000 (P. 36). According to these figures, Russia’s population has declined by approximately 3 percent in the post-Soviet era. The decline in Russia’s post-Soviet population is even more severe than the population decline during the civil war period between 1917 and 1920, when Russia’s population declined by 2.7 million. It should be noted that such a dramatic decline in population has not been witnessed elsewhere in peacetime.
Due to the dramatic nature of this demographic change, many academic books and articles on Russia’s demographic trends have been published in recent years. These academic works have focused on the composition of and the trends in Russia’s post-Soviet population. There has been still a need for an updated and comprehensive work focusing on Russia’s demographic trends in the Tsarist and Soviet periods as well as the post-Soviet period.
The publication of the Russian translation of Piotr Eberhardt’s latest book, originally published in Polish in 2002, is a very welcome contribution to the existing literature on Russia’s population dynamics. Prof. Eberhardt has been affiliated with the Stanisław Leszczycki Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization of the Polish Academy of Sciences since 1960. He is one of the leading experts on geographic and demographic issues in Central and Eastern European countries.
Eberhardt’s book is structured into ten chapters. The first two chapters examine the general dynamics of Russia’s population growth. The following two chapters analyze Russia’s population by looking at its territorial distribution and ethnic composition. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the process of urbanization and the depopulation of Russia’s rural areas. Chapter 7 analyzes the changes in Russia’s demographic structure. The next chapter discusses migration trends, while chapter 9 explores the Russian diaspora in the post-Soviet states. The book concludes with some forecasts for Russia’s future demographic development.
Throughout his book, Eberhardt seeks to show that Russia is experiencing a very serious demographic crisis. He substantiates his analysis by examining statistical data on Russia’s population in urban and rural areas, as well as migration trends in the post-Soviet era. This analysis leads Eberhardt to reach several conclusions about post-Soviet population dynamics.
In the first two chapters, Eberhardt points out that the decline in Russia’s population resulted from the collapse of the birth rate and a catastrophic increase in the death rate (P. 50). Although one could quite easily accept this conclusion, readers expect a more thorough analysis of the causes of this decline. In fact, what makes the Russian case unique is that although the decline in birth rate is very common in many advanced industrial countries, the scale of the increase in Russia’s death rate is not visible in developed and many developing countries.
In the following four chapters (from 3 to 6), Eberhardt explores Russia’s population dynamics by looking at the changes in Russia’s 89 regions and in the population’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious identification, as well as at the processes of urbanization and depopulation in rural areas. Concerning these trends, Eberhardt concludes that since the post-Soviet economic crisis hit the industries in the northern and eastern parts of Russia, there has been a migration trend from these regions to the central and southern parts of the country (P. 85). However, as Eberhardt shows in chapter 4, these central and southern parts of the country are populated by non-Russians, who, like ethnic Russians themselves, tend to retain their distinctive ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities. Therefore, the impact of internal migration trends on interethnic relations deserves to be examined in this book in a more detailed manner.
Eberhardt’s conclusions in chapter 7 concerning the changes in Russia’s demographic structure are also very interesting. His tables on page 190 clearly show that the percentages of men and elderly people in the composition of Russian society are increasing in the post-Second World War period. The percentage of men in the composition of Russian society increased from 44.6% in 1959 to 46.9% in 2000, while the percentage of the people over age 50 increased from 18.1% in 1959 to 28.2% in 2000. These figures, when combined with the figures on the increase in unemployment (P. 206), show that Russia needs to create more jobs and to improve its pension system simultaneously. Probably, Vladimir Putin’s recent attempts at reforming the social security system is a reflection of this urgent need.
The author’s analysis of post-Soviet migration trends in Russia, as well as of the state of the new Russian diaspora in post-Soviet states, needs to be examined briefly. In chapter 8, Eberhardt shows that between 1990 and 1999, ethnic Russians migrated from almost all of the post-Soviet states to the Russian Federation (P. 234). His analysis in chapter 9, where he examines the nature of the Russian diaspora in post-Soviet states, demonstrates that the striking feature of this net inflow of ethnic Russians was that they migrated mainly from the post-Soviet states in Central Asia and the Caucasus. At the same time, Russians tended to stay in the post-Soviet Baltic republics, where the titular nationalities have adopted comparatively harsher policies toward ethnic Russians (P. 247).
Eberhardt identifies an opposite trend during the same period in the population movements between Russia and western states, with a net outflow from Russia to these countries, especially to Germany, Israel, and the United States (P. 242). The fact that immigration surpassed emigration in the post-Soviet era shows how serious is Russia’s post-Soviet demographic regression, which seems to be explained by the difference between high death rates and low birth rates rather than to the population movements between Russia and the outside world.
The final chapter of Eberhardt’s book presents a forecast of Russia’s population dynamics by discussing the Russian case in comparative perspective. Eberhardt compares Russian population trends to similar trends in other countries. According to Eberhardt, Russia, which has the sixth largest population at present after China, India, the US, Indonesia, and Brazil, is likely to have the fourteenth largest population in 2050. Eberhardt estimates that the Russian population will decline to 121.3 million in 2050 while Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Congo, Mexico, the Philippines, and Vietnam will be added to the list of countries that have larger populations than Russia (P. 285).
In general, Eberhardt’s book provides readers with a comprehensive historical perspective on Russia’s demographic trends as well as the most complete and updated statistical data. The book is very rich in terms of tables and visual demonstration of the geographical distribution of population through maps.
The analytical strength of the book comes from the author’s success in not only putting Russia’s demographic trends in historical perspective, but also in substantiating his analysis with statistical data. The author’s ability to cope with a wide range of statistical data is indeed impressive. Furthermore, the material itself highlights the complexity of Russia’s demographic trends. Therefore, the book is a very useful resource for scholars of post-Soviet Russian demography.
Although it is not a weakness (since Eberhardt limited the scope of research to the demographic changes in Russian population), his book would have been much more interesting had the author examined the socio-economic causes of these demographic changes as well as the impact of these demographic changes on Russia’s socio-economic and foreign policies. The research value of the book may also have been greater if the author had investigated the scope of influence of the demographic changes in Russia’s ethnic Russian and non-Russian populations on relations between Russia’s federal center and her 89 regions.
All in all, I would like to recommend enthusiastically Eberhardt’s extremely informative and analytical work to all those interested in Russia’s demographic trends.