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Russia is huge the country spans through eleven different time zones across two different
Continents and takes up about one-eighth of all the land on earth
Despite all of this though. Russia has a critical problem. Russia is shrinking it's not shrinking in land
Russia has plenty of that
Instead russia's shrinking problem is with her population, which has been nearly
Continuously going down for nearly 30 years
Now when you're only looking at the size of countries based on how much land they have Russia clearly wins that race
but when you factor in Russia's population of about one hundred and forty four million people
Russia comes in as only the ninth largest country in the world behind a lot of other countries that are
Significantly smaller in land like Pakistan Nigeria and most interestingly
Bangladesh a country that is
118 times
Smaller than Russia but has over 20 million more people living there an even stranger case is the island of Java
Inside of Indonesia. Java is
123 times smaller than Russia is but the islands population of
141 million easily compares with Russia's entire population of
144 million and it didn't used to always be this way as recently as
1900 the territory of modern Russia itself without factoring in the rest of the Russian empires
population at the time had the third highest
population of any country in the world only remaining behind
Qing China and British controlled India
there were more Russians at the time than there were Americans but within a century all of that had
Completely changed and the biggest reason why it changed and the reason why modern Russia is still struggling so much with this
problem is largely because of the second world war a war which absolutely
devastated the Soviet Union and Russia specifically in just four years of war between 1941 and
1945 the USSR lost a mind-boggling
13.7 percent of her entire
Population if we divide the USSR up into its separate Republic's we can see that Russia itself lost
12.7% of
all of her people more than one out of every four people in Belarus died while Ukraine
Lithuania Latvia Armenia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia
Estonia and Moldova also all took heavy losses
along with other Eastern European countries like Poland the fact of the matter is is Eastern Europe in general took a
Massive population hit in only four years and the scars that that war left upon society here can still be felt today
one statistic that I'm reminded about that is
Particularly haunting is the one about males born inside of the Soviet Union during
1923 if you were born a boy
Anywhere inside of the USSR that year then right at Birth. You would only be given a
20% chance of staying alive long enough to see your 23rd birthday in
1946 80
Percent of all boys born in the USSR that year would be dead by the time of January 1st
1946 just
23 years later
if we take a look at Russia's population pyramid a chart which shows
people living inside of a country of all ages
You can see healthy growth at first and then a massive gash during the years of World War two in the years immediately
Following the war the population began to rebound but slowed down in the late 1960s
this slowdown was the first echo of the Second World War all
Those millions of young people who died in the 1940s who didn't have any children of their own
meant that all of their millions of unborn children
Weren't alive to have their own children twenty to twenty-five years later by the time of the late 1960s
Which caused population growth to slag?
fast-forward another 20 to 25 years to the early
1990s and you can see the second echo of World War 2 where the great-grandchildren of
Everybody who died during the war would have been born had they survived the echo of wars effect on
Population at the time was worsened by the fact that in 1991 the USSR
itself collapsed which through Russia into deep economic and social
upheaval the birthrate plummeted while the death rates soared Russia experienced its first actual drop in population since
1945 in
1992 the first year after the Soviet Union's collapse
Massive economic and social hardships experienced in the chaos of that collapse
contributed to many people just deciding not to have children or to migrate away from the country and
Combined with a second echo of the war Russia's population
continued to shrink every single year from 1992 up until 2012 Russia began to grow again between
2013 and 2015 but then has shrunk more every year from
2016 up to the present some of this modern shrinkage can be attributed to the second world wars third echo on russian society
Which is happening right now
the
Great-great-grandchildren the people who died without children in the war would normally be getting born right now. And since that's obviously not happening
It's having a marked effect, but there are other factors at work as well
Another is that Russia is currently experiencing more economic hardships in 2014
Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula a move which added over 2 million people into Russia's population
pool and which still wasn't enough to boost Russia's population back to the level seen in
1991 with several sanctions passed against Russia by several countries around the world as a consequence of this annexation
Russia shrunk from the world's ninth largest economy in 2014 a position equal to Russia's rank in population
Down to the world's 12th largest economy five years later in 2019 with via Canada and South Korea
overtaking her another problem that hasn't been mentioned yet and that
Certainly plays a factor is Russia's geography and the fact that most of it is pretty inhospitable in modern times 77
percent of Russia's entire population or
110 million people live inside just the European part of Russia where the temperatures are more mild
But this part of Russia only accounts for 23 percent of Russia's land the rest belongs to a huge region called
Siberia which is the inverse of European Russia it accounts for
77 percent of Russia's land, but only 23 percent of Russia's population if
Siberia was an independent country. It would still be the largest country on earth in size
But it would have a smaller population than California
Siberia is largely
Undeveloped and extremely hostile to human habitation with brutal and long winters with absurdly cold temperatures
because of this most of Siberia is
completely empty without many human settlements and as a result Russia doesn't really have as much land that can be settled by people as
It may seem at first
Bangladesh and the island of Java may be over a hundred times smaller than Russia in total land
But they arguably have more easily settleable and rich
Agricultural land than Russia does which in part helps to explain why they have higher or similar populations
Russia's geography has in a way always been one of the country's greatest challenges to overcome
And it continues to be a massive hurdle for the country to overcome in order to expand her
population when you combine all of these factors together along with other issues like a
moderately low rate of immigration in regards to Russia's size and it begins to paint an overall picture if the current shrinking
Population trend continues up until 2050 Russia will find itself in a position where she is only the 14th largest country in the world
far behind countries like Nigeria Pakistan
Ethiopia Bangladesh the Philippines
Mexico the Democratic Republic of the Congo and even Egypt
Those estimates are the official estimates of the United Nations though, and they're far from the most pessimistic
other estimates by other demographers believe that if the population shrinkage returns to the same levels that Russia experienced during the
1990s the population could dwindle down to as little as
110 million making Russia about equal to what Iran will probably look like at the same time in terms of population
Numbers the next 30 years will almost certainly be an interesting and decisive time for the Russian nation
Understanding Russia is complicated especially from an outsider's perspective
Winston Churchill once said of Russia that it is a riddle wrapped up in a mystery inside of an enigma
So if you really want to go into some serious depth behind
understanding Russian history and civilization
There's no better book than a history of Russia from Peter the Great to Gorbachev written and narrated by Mark Steinberg
The entire audio book is offered on audible and it's nearly 19 hours long
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