Aging of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Russia's population is shrinking, and the numbers behind that sentence carry enormous weight. The United Nations projects a drop from 146 million people in 2022 to 135.8 million by 2050. In a worst-case scenario mapped out by the Russian statistics agency Rosstat in January 2024, the figure could fall to 130 million by 2046. And by 2100, the UN's range of projections places Russia somewhere between 74 million and 112 million people, a potential loss of a quarter to half of the current population.

  The median age tells a parallel story. In 1990 it stood at 32.2 years. By 2025 it had climbed to 40.3. The share of Russians older than 65 rose from 10% in 1990 to 16.6% in 2023. These are not abstract statistics. They describe a society where fewer workers support more retirees, where waves of emigration, military casualties, and pandemic deaths have compounded generations of demographic pressure.

  Russian journalist Andrey Kolesnikov put it starkly: "We are seeing a phenomenon Russia has faced many times: wave after wave of wars and repression that drain away human resources." How Russia arrived at this point, and what its leaders are doing about it, is a story stretching back more than a century.

• 2. Empire to Soviet Union

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  Before the First World War, the Russian Empire held a remarkable distinction: it had the fastest-growing population among world powers, second only to the United States. That momentum carried enormous demographic weight into the twentieth century.

  The losses that followed were staggering. The First World War, the Civil War, and repeated famines tore through the population during the interwar decades. Yet the Soviet republic that emerged from the chaos managed to absorb those losses and keep growing. Between 1920 and 1940, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic grew at an average rate of 1.11% per year and pushed past 100 million people.

  The Second World War reversed that trajectory with brutal force. The Eastern Front alone accounted for up to 40 million of the 70-85 million deaths attributed to the entire conflict. Russia proper lost as many as 13 million people, and because young men bore the brunt of those casualties, the war left a profound imbalance between the sexes. As late as 1959, men made up less than 45% of Russia's total population.

  Despite a modest baby boom after the war, the demographic shift toward an older population was already underway by the 1960s. The proportion of Russians aged 60 and older doubled between 1959 and 1990. Even so, the population kept growing because Russia still had a large pool of potential parents. From 1951 to 1990, the Russian population increased by 45,760,000 people, buying time against the structural pressures accumulating beneath the surface.

• 3. The 1990s Inflection Point

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  The dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s delivered a shock that the demographic structure could no longer absorb. The age distribution had gradually shifted into a shape that made population decline more likely than growth, and the economic crisis that followed the Soviet collapse triggered a sharp fall in fertility at the same moment.

  Many developed countries have experienced falling birth rates, but Russia's experience was distinct in one critical way: the fertility crash arrived alongside rising mortality. Relative to death rates recorded in 1990, millions of excess deaths followed over the next decade, concentrated heavily among Russian men. The combination meant that from 1992 to 2008, Russia experienced net population loss. For a period migration provided some offset, but from 2020 onward that buffer disappeared, and natural population decline went uncompensated.

  Russian economist Alexander Isakov described the drivers plainly: "Russia's population has been declining and the war will reduce it further. Reasons? Emigration, lower fertility and war-related casualties." The 1990s established the pattern that later events would deepen.

  Forecasts from the Russian Academy of Sciences issued in the early 2000s projected that by 2016, Russians aged 60 and older would make up 20% of the population, while children under 15 would account for only 17%. There was one partial counterweight: high mortality among older Russians has acted as a brake on the pace of aging, keeping the share of those 65 and over from growing as rapidly as it might otherwise have.

• 4. Pandemic and War

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  In 2020, Russia recorded over 500,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19, and from the pandemic's onset through that year the total attributed deaths reached approximately 700,000. The following year was initially projected to be less severe, but death rates still outpaced birth rates. Between October 2020 and September 2021, Russia's natural population shrank by 997,000, reflecting the gap between births and deaths over that span. The natural death rate in January of 2020, 2021, and 2022 each ran close to double the natural birth rate.

  President Vladimir Putin had announced a plan in 2017 to reverse the demographic stagnation. It showed partial signs of working before the pandemic disrupted whatever recovery was underway.

  The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 added a new layer of pressure. High military fatalities, a renewed wave of brain drain, and human capital flight driven by Western sanctions and boycotts pushed the crisis deeper. In March 2023, The Economist reported that over the prior three years Russia had "lost around 2 million more people than it would ordinarily have done, as a result of war, disease and exodus."

  The UN's projections account for these compounding trends. If current demographic conditions hold, the UN estimates Russia's population could reach 120 million in fifty years, a decline of roughly 17% from the current level. That figure sits at the more optimistic end of the UN's 2100 range, which bottoms out at 74 million.

• 5. Political Responses

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  Russian politicians have reached back toward Soviet-era tools in their search for levers to pull. Many have called for reinstating the childless tax, a measure that existed in Russia from the 1940s until the 1990s, as a way to penalize those without children and encourage higher birth rates.

  In August 2022, Russia revived the Mother Heroine award, a Soviet-era honor given to women who raise ten children. The revival of that specific designation signaled the government's intent to use symbolic recognition alongside policy instruments.

  In November 2024, Putin signed legislation banning what the law called "childfree propaganda," aimed at discouraging voluntary childlessness. That same year, a decree on national development goals set a life expectancy target of 81 years by 2036. That figure updated an earlier goal of 78 years by 2030, raising the bar even as the demographic trends pointed in the opposite direction.

  The economic dimension of population aging runs through all of these responses. With a reduced fertility rate, each worker in Russia must effectively support more retirees. Russia was projected to face labor shortages by 2025. The government's challenge is not merely cultural or symbolic; it is structural, tied to the ratio between working-age people and those who have left the labor force. Whether the legislative and award-based measures will shift that ratio meaningfully remains an open question that the Rosstat projection for 2046 will eventually answer.