Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov has said reviving the nation's birth rate is one of Russia's "top priorities."

Russia has moved to classify key demographic statistics following a dramatic collapse in its birth rate, which has plunged to levels not seen since the late 18th or early 19th century, according to a leading Russian demographer.

For decades, Russia has been experiencing a plunging birth rate and population decline, which appears to have worsened amid its ongoing invasion of Ukraine—with high casualty rates and men fleeing the country to avoid being conscripted to fight.

Projections estimate that Russia’s population will fall to about 132 million in the next two decades. The United Nations has predicted that in a worst-case scenario, by the start of the next century, Russia’s population could almost halve to 83 million.

  • Bruncvik@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    8 hours ago

    I was permabanned from r/worldnews for this, due to racism, so I’m risking the same here. But there is a theory among armchair historians–which I tend to agree with–that Russians had been targets of regressive selective breeding for the past 450 years. Those who display any kind of individualism or independence (mainly educated, intellectuals, etc) have been selectively eliminated from the gene pool: via exile (best case scenario), or through prisons, labour camps or executions. After centuries of this, the share of independently thinking Russians in Russia is far lower than that of native population in Western European countries.

    This is very prominent in science and technology: many of the top inventors weren’t ethnic Russians, but were born or had ancestry in countries that have been under Russian dictate (and regressive evolution) for a much shorter time period. Sergei Korolev, the father of Russian space program was ethnic Hungarian. Russia “boasts” only 15 Nobel laureates in STEM fields since 1917, and only one of them (Nikolay Semyonov) was an ethnic Russian who wasn’t in exile.

    All this helps to explain why Russians are so passive in the face of authority. It also points at the fallacy of thinking that we can push them towards accepting western civilization and democracy in the short term. It will take a very long time and a lot of effort to bring them to the moral ideal of Western Europe.

    • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      7 hours ago

      I agree but not in genetic sense but more of a cultural sense imo.

      I grew up in Eastern Europe and witnesses soviet collapse and culture shift myself. It went from this obedient “no my problem” passive anger and misery to a society that actually cares for each other and is warm and optimistic which only started to regress recently because of fucking ruskies again.

      It’s so frustrating to see this great evil plague the world and pretend that it’s “1 bad putin” when the entire culture has been morphed into facilitating and growing this disgusting evil like rotting bread grows mold.