by Paul Morland
While there was some focus in Putin’s 2006 speech on the need to lower the death rate, for example by reducing traffic accidents and upgrading health care, the focus was on the need to boost childbirth. Putin explicitly linked low fertility to problems of low income, inadequate housing and poor prospects for the health care and education of children. He even suggested that parents were worried simply about feeding their children. With a fundamentally material and financial interpretation of the problem, Putin’s response was a capital grant on the birth of a child and improved rights for working mothers. As ever, it is difficult to know whether these policies have been responsible for the recovery in Russia’s total fertility rate or whether the recovery relates to other factors.
Before its disintegration, the Soviet Union was becoming less Russian and the Russian nationality represented a bare majority of the total population and a declining one at that. Retreating into the borders of what had been the RSFSR meant a consolidation and a demographic strengthening from an ethnic perspective within a more limited but still vast space. However, just as ethnic Russians had lived across what had been the Soviet Union and not only within the RSFSR, so there were non-Russian minorities within the new Russian Federation, some of them ‘indigenous’ in the sense that their presence long pre-dated the Soviet Union, others more recent arrivals, attracted by the opportunities which the metropolitan centre offered.
In thinking about the Russianness of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, we have to distinguish between three phenomena: first, the ‘return’ of Russians from the ‘near abroad’, people preferring to live in Russia than in the newly independent republics: second, the indigenous populations of non-ethnic Russians within the republic, such as Tartars and Chechens, many of them Muslims and demonstrating the relatively higher fertility rates of their central Asian co-religionists, and third, the influx of non-ethnic Russians into the Federation, generally from the former non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union and mostly to the major cities. The first of these phenomena has had the effect of strengthening the Russian composition of the population (while continuing to diminish the Russian presence in the ‘near abroad’), the second and third of diluting it. A fourth phenomenon can also be considered, and that is the emigration of non-ethnic Russians since the end of the Soviet Union, particularly of around 1 million Jews to Israel and 500,000 Germans to Germany, which although numerically limited and essentially a one-off, nevertheless has had some impact in increasing the Russianness of Russia by reducing minorities within its borders.
The best way to disentangle these various strands is to investigate the ethnic composition of Russia as a whole. In 1959, the population of the RSFSR was more than 83% Russian.49 In 2002 the population of the Russian Federation was around 80% ethnically Russian, a modest but material drop. By 2010 the Russian share was down to below 78%.50 The largest minority, the Tartars, comprised around 4% of the population.51 Although there appears to be a solid Russian majority, there are trends which should be worrying to Russian ethno-nationalists. In 1989–2002, while the ethnic Russian population of the Russian Federation had declined from just under 120 million to just under 116 million, the number of Chechens had grown from less than 1 million to more than 1.33 million–this despite a vicious war and alleged genocide in Chechnya. In Russia as a whole at that point, the median age was just over thirty-seven whereas in Chechnya it was under thirty-three.52
Meanwhile, the influx of central Asians and people from the Caucasus into the large Russian cities is transforming their ethnic make-up: Moscow, for example, is believed to be around 20% Muslim.53 Although the leadership of the Russian Federation proclaims a multi-ethnic and multi-faith rhetoric, it nevertheless tightened its citizenship laws in 2002, making it more difficult for those of non-Russian origin to obtain Russian citizenship than had been the case under the laxer 1991 law, essentially adopting jus sanguinis or rights depending on ‘blood’ or ethnic origin.54 Moreover, while the primary demographic concern of the Russian authorities continues to be the low fertility and high mortality rate for the country as a whole, it appears that they are aware of the long-term likelihood of a shifting ethnic mix in Russia as well, and have taken action which, if it has not stemmed the inflow of non-Russians into Russia, has at least reduced their rights to Russian citizenship. Thus as the multi-ethnic rhetoric continues to hold at the level of the national leadership, this is not always the case at local level. Moscow, now believed to have the largest Muslim population of any city in Europe of perhaps as many as 2 million people, has only six mosques despite requests to build more (Moscow’s mayor has described the number of Muslims in his city as ‘excessive’ and ‘harmful’–a statement which would be totally rejected from a mayor of a major city in Western Europe; indeed London’s mayor is a Muslim).55
The Orthodox World Beyond Russia
Until the end of the 1980s the USSR was often thought of as part of a more or less single entity alongside the rest of the Soviet bloc, a political grouping that included countries which were neither linguistically Slavic nor religiously Orthodox (e.g. East Germany and Hungary), Slavic but not Orthodox (e.g. Czechoslovakia and Poland), Orthodox but not Slavic (e.g. Romania) and both Slavic and Orthodox (e.g. Bulgaria). The Orthodox world since 1991, with the ending of the Communist enterprise, can arguably be located culturally and developmentally alongside Russia. It is worth noting that, with the collapse of Communism, the collapse of fertility in the former Communist countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s, from an already low base, was quite general. For example, the birth rate in the German Democratic Republic fell from thirteen per thousand in 1988 to five and a half per thousand in 1992, an extraordinary drop in such a short period.56 As in Russia, the general disruption and economic hardship were in part to blame, as well as a significant movement of young women of childbearing age to the West.
There is convincing evidence that nations and ethnic groups which can be grouped together as ‘civilisations’ have a tendency to behave in a similar fashion demographically as well as in other ways, and that this indeed is something which defines them as a civilisation. The West, meaning the US and Canada plus Western Europe and Australia and New Zealand, has followed a broadly similar pattern of post-war baby boom then falling fertility rates and mass immigration from less developed countries, all accompanied by steadily rising life expectancy. Similar broadly uniform patterns, albeit with local variations, have occurred in the Far East, the Middle East, Latin America, south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed these similarities have allowed this book to be organised along civilisational lines for the post-1945 period. The same is also the case for what can be described as the Christian Eastern Orthodox civilisation (called ‘Orthodox’ even if, after 1945, it was ruled by Communist regimes and its churches were for the most part marginalised or persecuted). Most Orthodox countries had by 1950 completed a large part of their demographic transition with only Russia and Serbia reporting a fertility rate of above three children per woman, and both were witnessing a rapid decline below that level by the mid to late 1950s. While the path these countries took has varied–with an unusual spike in the case of Romania–all have ended up at a point of exceptionally low fertility at the start of the twenty-first century. In all cases except Serbia, fertility dropped to well below one and a half children per woman, although in most cases there has been some recovery to or somewhat above that level in the last decade or so. (Unlike Russia, most Orthodox countries have experienced extending lifespans, so population declines from sub-replacement fertility rates have to some extent been counteracted.) Still, this is well below replacement level. The reasons for this are similar to those affecting Italy, Spain and Portugal: a mixture of modern attitudes to female education and aspiration alongside continuing traditional views on birth outside marriage.
The Romanian Spike
The late 1960s spike in Romanian fertility rates, however, is an example of a remarkable (and often tragic) contra-flow in this trend. Noting t
he decline in fertility rates in the 1950s and early 1960s, the authorities worried that this would slow the growth of population which it, more than other regimes in the Eastern bloc, regarded as a measure of prestige as well as a source of economic growth. The dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was ahead of his socialist colleagues elsewhere in the Soviet bloc in identifying demography as an issue, declaring that the ‘most important problem is that of a steadier population growth–an essential factor of the dynamics and of the productive forces of society… by the end of the next decade, Romania may number twenty-four to twenty-five million inhabitants’.57
So, overnight and unexpectedly, the regime outlawed abortion (with limited exceptions) in 1966. This was justified by the need to balance personal freedom on the one hand with the national requirement for ‘natural’ population growth on the other.58 Until that point, as in Russia, abortion had been the most common form of birth control; for example, in the year before the abortion ban, there had been four abortions for every birth. Not surprisingly, the fertility rate rose from two to three and a half children per woman almost immediately.59 For the late 1960s as a whole, however, the fertility rate was three, indicating that by the end of the decade the impact of the ban on fertility was wearing off. The one-off shock to the system had had an immediate effect, but the population began to find its way around the ban, either through illegal abortions or through alternative means of contraception. By the mid 1980s the fertility rate of Romanians was back to that of the country’s civilisational peer group.
Nevertheless, the policy had an impact for the best part of twenty years. Apart from resulting in a population larger than it would otherwise have been, it is likely that it also gave rise to the culture of unwanted births and under-resourced and neglectful state orphanages which so shocked Westerners after the fall of the Communist regime. As for Ceausescu’s population targets, they were not met. The population of Romania did rise a little above 23 million in the 1980s, but has since slipped back to below 20 million. The Romanian experiment is an interesting case study in the limitations of even the most authoritarian governments in manipulating demographic trends.
There is another aspect of the Romanian story that is worth noting with respect to the subject of demographic engineering or the deployment of demographic strategies by ethnic groups or states in conflict. The Romanian government was more transparently nationalist than some of its East European neighbours, and it pursued a patently ethno-Romanian strand in its demographic policy. It was markedly more relaxed than was the Soviet Union in allowing Jews to emigrate from Romania to Israel from the late 1960s, albeit in exchange for cash payments, while it is suggested that the abortion laws were less strictly implemented in the case of ethnic Hungarians and of Roma than for ethnic Romanians.60
The Yugoslav War
At the close of the cold war, most previously Communist countries managed a largely peaceful transition to capitalism, whether this involved remaining within the same boundaries (e.g. Poland, Hungary), splitting up (e.g. the Czech and Slovak republics) or merging (e.g. East Germany with West Germany). Most of these countries had been more or less ethnically homogeneous, at least since the massacres of the Second World War and the forced migrations which followed it, and had populations which were ethnically stable. This was not the case in Yugoslavia, however, and here demography played a role in a defining conflict of the 1990s.
Like the Russians, Serbs experienced a falling fertility rate after 1945, an experience shared by their fellow Yugoslavs of Christian heritage (Balts, Ukrainians, Moldovans and Byelorussians in the case of the Soviet Union; Croats and Slovenes in the case of Yugoslavia) but not by those of traditionally Islamic background (Caucasians and central Asians in the case of the Soviet Union; Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians in the case of Yugoslavia). The result was a diminishing proportion of Serbs within Yugoslavia, particularly in areas where they lived alongside Muslims. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Serb share of the population fell from 44% in 1948 to less than 33% in 1981 while the Muslim share rose from less than 33% to nearly 40% between the same dates. In Kosovo (unlike Bosnia-Herzegovina, located within the Serbian republic rather than being a separate republic within Yugoslavia), the Serb share of the population was already below a quarter in 1948 but by 1981 had reduced to barely 13%, the result not only of a lower birth rate than the local Albanians but also migration of ethnic Serbs to Serbia.61 Both these areas were sensitive so far as Serbian nationalists were concerned, the former being the area where Serb nationalists had triggered the outbreak of the First World War in 1918 by assassinating Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand; the latter being the location of a Serbian battle against the Turks in the fourteenth century which featured centrally in Serbian historic consciousness, and also the location of many medieval Serbian monasteries of historic importance. The aggregate population data partly disguises even more dramatic trends among the young: the share of under fourteens in the population of Serbia is half of that among Kosovars.62
In addition to the Serbian loss of demographic presence in these sensitive areas, there was the memory of the Second World War, when large numbers of Serbs had been massacred not only by Croats but also by Bosnian Muslims organised by the Nazi SS. The outbreak of war as Yugoslavia dissolved cannot be put down simplistically to demographic factors alone, but they certainly contributed. A careful study of where the violence took place during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina has shown that areas of declining Serbian population between 1961 and 1991 were particularly likely to witness fighting.63 In due course the fertility rates of Bosnian Muslims and of Albanians have fallen fast, and today Bosnia-Herzegovina (including both Serbs and Muslims as well as Croats) has, along with Moldova, the lowest fertility rate in Europe (barely one and a quarter children per woman), and even Kosovo’s total fertility rate is only around replacement level.
In summary, the former Yugoslavia is an exemplary case of the destabilising impact of uneven demographic transition, striking people of different religious or ethnic backgrounds at different times.
The Demography of Disappearance
Throughout the Christian Orthodox world the same forces have been at work. After long periods of low fertility rates, it is not just that young women are having fewer children but that there are fewer young women, so both the fertility rate and the birth rate are low. In many places economic opportunities have been scarce and a chance of migration to the wealthier regions of Western Europe has been open, making for large-scale emigration with little or no compensating inward migration (the exception being Russia, which has received immigration from the former republics of the USSR). A good example is Bulgaria, which had close to 9 million people in the 1980s; in 2015 it had barely 7 million, recent declines driven not just by low fertility rates but also by EU accession and attendant emigration opportunities. As ever in such cases, rural depopulation is rife. In a village where once eight hundred people lived, one of the two remaining inhabitants laments: ‘I am going to draw my last breath here. Sadly there is not a priest in Matochina. When I die they will have to call someone from elsewhere.’64
Nearby Moldova has lost more than 7% of its population since the early 1990s and, according to the UN median fertility population projection, will probably have lost another half by the end of the current century. By 2015 the populations of Greece and Bulgaria were among the seven oldest in the world in terms of median age.65 In the case of the Orthodox world, it is not just a single country but an entire civilisation which, unless something quite fundamental changes, will simply non-breed itself out of existence sometime in the next century.
The revolutionary swell of human population, having exploded in Britain in the early nineteenth century and spread across Europe, including Russia, and the lands of European conquest and colonisation, had finally broken on the banks of the Black Sea and retreated.
Yet this account covers only a mere minority of the earth’s surface and population. In continents beyond, far larger trends will play out
at a scale and speed that far surpasses the Western experience.
PART THREE
The Tide Goes Global: Beyond the Europeans
8
Japan, China and East Asia
The Ageing of Giants
In May 1905 Aleksey Novikov, a twenty-four-year-old peasant from southern Russia, found himself sailing into the Sea of Japan on board the battleship Oryol. Having previously been dismissed from the tsarist navy for political unreliability, he had been allowed to return at the outbreak of war the previous year. The fleet had left the Baltic in October 1904 and taken more than six months to reach its destination. On arrival in the Far East, Novikov and his comrades found themselves outmanoeuvred and outgunned by the Japanese navy, who disabled the squadron and sank several of the ships without themselves sustaining any more damage than ‘if they had been engaged in target practice’.1 Novikov was fortunate. After a relatively short period as a prisoner of war he returned to Russia where he resumed his revolutionary activities and eventually took up writing. Around 70,000 of his comrades did not survive the war: Russia lost eight battleships and many smaller vessels, losses which dwarfed those of the Japanese.