Russia has a dirty little secret. It faces a dire – perhaps even a fatal – population problem.
For decades, the country has struggled under deeply adverse demographics, with deaths outpacing births and successive waves of mass emigration. Russian officials have tried desperately to mitigate this downward trajectory, but to little avail. Despite Kremlin programs to boost “maternal capital” and President Vladimir Putin’s focus on population growth as a national priority, the number of Russians has continued to decline.
All this, moreover, has been made significantly worse over the past three-plus years by the Ukraine war. The conflict, and the Kremlin’s ongoing need for new troops to fuel its fight, has propelled Russians out of the country at record-breaking rates. After the Kremlin’s controversial Fall 2023 “partial mobilization,” the Washington Post described the resulting exodus as “a tidal wave on scale with emigration following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.” The war is also contributing to a massive decline in working-age males; this summer, Russia passed the grisly milestone of one million killed or wounded as a result of the conflict.
In fact, all the available data now paints a picture of a country in full-blown population crisis. Last Fall, Russia’s official ROSSTAT agency published statistics showing that the country’s birth rate is now at its lowest point in a quarter-century. Russia’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is roughly 1.4 births per woman – far below the 2.1 needed for a stable “replacement” of the national population. The situation has gotten so dire that ROSSTAT recently stopped publishing official figures altogether in an effort to cover up the true state of affairs.
But the problem persists, and the latest warning about its potential consequences comes from Russian Labor Minister Anton Kotyakov. At a mid-July cabinet meeting, Kotyakov reportedly told President Putin that the country is now facing an acute labor shortage. By 2030, he detailed, the Russian economy will need at least 2.4 million additional workers. (Other estimates put Russia looming labor deficit at even higher: three million workers or more.)
The only real answer is for Moscow to rely more and more heavily on migrant workers. Russia currently has an abundance of those: 10 million or more, by some tallies, with most hailing from Central Asia. But the number has dropped in recent years, and Russia is now facing “a massive shortfall in migrant labour,” Novaya Gazeta Europe reported last Fall.
That’s because Putin’s increasingly nationalist, draconian governing style has made the country downright hostile for non-Russians. A recent survey by OpenMinds, a “cognitive defense tech” firm, found a massive surge of online hate speech and negative media attention directed against migrants in the country. These souring sentiments have been matched by government action; in February, the Kremlin launched a “controlled people” register that creates “stricter measures for foreign nationals violating migration laws” – including shutting off access to jobs, expedited deportations and bank account freezes. All of which has cast an understandable pall over Russia as a labor destination.
What Moscow might do about this is unclear. It’s hard to imagine a kinder, gentler Kremlin policy toward migrants – one that rolls out the welcome mat for exactly the same foreign workers who are being mistreated currently. But even if it somehow does adopt such an open-door approach, Russia’s growing international isolation, and mounting fears along its periphery that the conflict with Ukraine will be inevitably followed by more of the same elsewhere, are bound to keep Russian labor low.
At the heart of the matter is a stark reality: with his policies, Putin has virtually insured that fewer and fewer people outside of his small gang of loyalists have a real stake in the Russian national project. The consequences of that are bound to be ruinous.
