Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the interpretation of facts and data.
Lenox native James Brooke has traveled to about 100 countries reporting for The New York Times, Bloomberg and Voice of America.
New Russian census data indicate that ethnic Russians have fallen to 72 percent of Russia’s 147 million people, well below the 80 percent usually touted by the Kremlin. Reflecting sensitivity over the nation’s shrinking Slavic gene pool, the government quietly released the ethnic portion of the 2021 census during Russia’s long New Year’s holidays. Even so, news stories citing “non-Russian” names of the first babies born in the New Year sparked a series of racist diatribes across Russia’s internet.
The decade-long reduction in ethnic Russians came despite clear efforts to massage numbers. After the 2014 annexations of Crimea and much of Ukraine’s Donbas, Russia acquired 6 million Russian-speaking Ukrainians. However, the census reported that the number of Ukrainians registered as living in Russia dropped by 1 million over the decade. The number of Belarusians dropped by 60 percent to 208,000. Most of these missing Slavs might have been reclassified as Russian.
With two Russian deaths for each birth, Russia’s population now shrinks by 1 million people a year, according to figures by Rosstat, the Federal State Statistics Service. With the median age now 40, Russia’s population could drop by the end of this century to 70 million — about half of today’s level, the chairman of the Institute for Demography, Migration and Regional Development told reporters in Moscow.
Aggravated by the war shock, births last year dropped by six percent compared to 2021. Russia’s shrinking Slavic population may explain the Kremlin’s program to import Russian-speaking Ukrainian civilians.
“Russian authorities have interrogated, detained, and forcibly deported between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children, from their homes to Russia – often to isolated regions in the Far East,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony A. Blinken said last July, near the highwater mark for Russia’s military advances. “Reports also indicate Russian authorities are deliberately separating Ukrainian children from their parents and abducting others from orphanages before putting them up for adoption inside Russia.”
As Russia plans to draft 350,000 more men over the next two months, recruiters face an acute manpower shortage. Last year, the war and the draft prompted 1 million Russians — overwhelmingly young men — to flee the country. To fill the ranks, Wagner, a private military corporation, recruited 40,000 convicts from prisons, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby estimated last month. Of these soldiers, Wagner lost 4,100 dead and 10,000 wounded, a White House official recently told The Guardian.
Overall, Russia has lost 180,000 killed or wounded during its 11-month assault on Ukraine, Norwegian Defense Chief Eirik Kristoffersen told France’s TV2 last Sunday. By contrast, he estimated Ukraine’s military casualties at 100,000, and civilians killed at 30,000. Facing a shortage of Russian young men, Russia’s military leaders may raise the draft age from 27 to 30 and double the length of service to two years.
From the war’s start, military recruiters targeted the areas that the 2021 census showed as the most demographically vibrant — the Muslim South. Of Russia’s 10 largest peoples, the only three that showed population growth were in the South: Chechens up by 243,000, and two groups in Dagestan, the Avars and the Dargins, up by 100,000 and 55,000 respectively. By contrast, ethnic Russians were down nationwide by 5.4 million to 105.6 million. Ethnic Russians have largely disappeared from the North Caucasus.
Of the Russia’s 15 largest peoples, a majority of eight are now in the North Caucasus. Paul A. Goble, a former Soviet nationalities analyst for the CIA, wrote last week: “All these nationalities have a vastly younger age structure with far more children under five compared to older cohorts and thus are on course to increase their rankings and demographic ‘weight’ still further in the future, a trend that flies in the face of Putin’s desire to Russianize if not Russify these and other peoples.”
Tatars, a largely Muslim people on the Middle Volga, were shocked to learn that their numbers dropped by almost 600,000, or 11 percent, to 4.7 million. But within the borders of Tatarstan, they actually increased by 78,000, meaning that all losses occurred among Tatars living elsewhere in Russia. This big drop outside of Tatarstan seems to be a product of assimilation, mixed marriages and pressure on census-takers to list respondents as Russian. The number of census respondents who did not give their nationality tripled in a decade, hitting 16.6 million.
Rosstat had promised the census results last September. Goble writes in the Eurasia Monitor: “Given what [Rosstat’s] census takers have found, it is no surprise that the institution has delayed matters as much as possible in the hopes that no one would notice.”
Lenox native James Brooke has traveled to about 100 countries reporting for The New York Times, Bloomberg and Voice of America. He reported from Russia for eight years and from Ukraine for six years, coming home a year ago.
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