Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual address to parliament on 12 December highlighted once again the obsession that Putin (justifiably) has with Russia’s demography.

Labour and Social Development Minister Maxim Topilin recently announced that Russia experienced a natural population growth of 790 people in the first 10 months of 2012.  This miniscule increase was greeted with huge relief as it indicated the first such rise in years, and it has been hailed as a vindication of the various subsidies introduced since 2007 for mothers having two or more children.

The pessimists, however, say that the (tiny) rise was linked to the baby boom of the 1980s and will be temporary.

Igor Beloborodov, head of the Moscow-based Demographic Research Institute, called the advance a “mockery for such a huge country” and he said it will turn back into a decline within two years.

Russia’s population currently stands at 143m, and since the fall of the Soviet Union it has increased in only three years, those of 1994, 2009, and 2011, largely as a result of immigration.  In no year since 1992 has there been a natural increase in population – that is an excess of births over deaths.

In a presidential decree in May, Putin ordered the government to secure an increase in the birth rate to 1.75 babies per woman and an increase in life expectancy to 74 years, from the current 70, by 2018.  However, an average birth rate of 2.3 babies per woman is needed to keep the population in balance.  Experts say that the number of women aged 20-30 will fall from the current level of 13m to 7.5m in 2025.

That this preys on Putin’s mind was clear from his address to parliament.  Putin told parliament that Russia is facing a “real demographic and values-related crisis”.  In full catastrophe mode, he warned: “In case the nation is not capable of safeguarding and reproducing itself, if it forfeits life objectives and ideals, then an external enemy will matter nothing to it, as everything will fall into pieces by itself anyway.”