Chukotka is an unlikely center for a resurgence of Russian civilization. For one, it’s hardly the “center” of anything. Its capital, Anadyr, is also the country’s easternmost city and sits just below the Arctic Circle.
It’s closer to Chicago than it is to Moscow. A road connecting it to the rest of Siberia is on track for completion… in 21 years. Until then, the only way out is this airport, accessible only by helicopter for half the year.
Nor is there much “civilization” to be found. Despite being larger than France, the region’s entire population would fill less than half of Michigan Stadium. Life here moves pretty slowly.
When two brave Australian tourists visited in 2018, they made the local news. And yet tiny, remote Anadyr, of all places, was one of the first stops Putin made this year. There, in a staged meeting with local residents, the president celebrated its rising number of large families, portraying the town as a model for the rest of the country, a beacon of hope for Russia’s future.
So, what “rising number,” exactly, was Putin referring to? A net population increase of 157 between 2010 and 2021, or 14 people per year. …Not quite the shining success story the Kremlin would have you believe.
Still, he wasn’t wrong. An increase of 157 — any increase, in fact — is far more than most places can claim. Between 2010 and 17, over 70% of Russian cities shrunk in size.
And while Chukotka’s fertility rate of 1. 6 is well below the world average, it’s among the highest in Russia, where children are becoming increasingly rare. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union had one of the highest birth rates in Europe.
Its population peaked at nearly 149 million, making it the 6th largest country in the world. But after its collapse in ‘91, its birth rate has never recovered. Since then, more Russians have died than been born for every one of the last 33 years except three.
Russia was first overtaken by Pakistan, then Nigeria, and finally Bangladesh. And by the end of this century, it’s expected to fall all the way down to 20th place, shrinking to three and a half times smaller than the United States. Needless to say, these are troubling signs for a leader intent on reviving the Soviet legacy.
And it gets worse. Because the Soviet Union collapsed 33 years ago, birth rates fell 33 years ago, which means today, 33 years later, Russia is missing a whole lot of 33-year-olds — the prime working-age demographic. As a result, the country has a massive shortage of labor — especially of the blue-collar and tech variety, which skew much younger.
A mere 15% of all workers are under 30 years old and the unemployment rate has now reached a new low of just 2. 6%. …Not to mention, this dwindling 20-35-year-old group is the exact one you’d need, to, say, fight a troop-intensive war.
Now, Russia is not alone. Far from it. China’s birth rate, famously, fell much faster.
Korea’s is much worse. And Japan’s has stayed low for even longer. Families across the developed world are getting smaller and much of Europe and East Asia is shrinking.
Take Italy, for instance. As you can see, both it and Russia saw the same roughly 50% drop in births — albeit, with a ten-year delay. Likewise, both will experience the same economic challenges stemming from their smaller working-age populations.
More retirees withdrawing pensions than young people funding them. Fewer children left supporting a larger number of older relatives. Fewer inventors to invent things, landscapers to landscape, and caregivers to care for a growing cadre of seniors.
Russia may be in trouble, you might think, but no more so than Italy, or Japan, or Britain. “Nothing to see here. ” But… there’s a critical difference.
While the effects may look the same, the causes couldn’t be more different. In Italy, like most countries, these unfortunate problems have a silver lining. Birth rates fell because fewer teenagers were getting pregnant.
Women could go to school, had more career opportunities, and were increasingly free to have as many or as few children as they wanted. An economic defeat, but a human victory. Whereas, in Russia, this drop was less a choice and more a reaction — to hard times, mass unemployment, and a general sense of uncertainty and despair.
An economic and human failure. Meanwhile, Italians were also living longer, healthier lives. Medicine was advancing, the standard of living was rising, and pollution was being regulated.
Thus, even while the country got older, the number of deaths, as you can see, remained more or less constant. The same cannot be said of Russia. And this is where the two countries really begin to diverge.
There, deaths surged at the exact moment birth rates fell, producing what demographers call the “Russian Cross. ” And this was not just a temporary phenomenon — deaths have remained high ever since. There’s no silver lining to be found here.
This is the bleak story of a nation being squeezed simultaneously from two directions — fewer births and more deaths. Consider, for a moment, the scale of this tragedy. The annual number of deaths more than doubled during the thirty years when HIV treatment, ICUs, and organ transplants became widely available.
As the economist Nicholas Eberstadt once observed, the last 16 years of Soviet rule saw 11 million more births than deaths. Over the next sixteen years, it saw 12 million more deaths than births. These are war-like casualties in peacetime.
So, what exactly caused all these deaths? One clue is that heart-related fatalities — the leading kind — seem to spike on the weekend. Another is that — whatever the cause — it appears less common in Muslim-majority regions.
All signs, in other words, point to alcohol. The problem is not simply one of quantity. Though it certainly doesn’t help that in some years Russians have consumed almost double what the World Health Organization considers to be dangerous.
The problem, above all, is what kind of alcohol, where, and when. The French sip wine, the British beer, and Russians, overwhelmingly, vodka. Some stereotypes, apparently, are true.
Not only do Russians get more intoxicated, faster, as a result, but a deeply embedded culture of social and binge drinking compounds these effects. During Soviet times, vodka was sold with non-reusable caps. Bottles were consumed all at once, usually in groups, and often in uncontrolled public spaces — unsupervised by bartenders.
This is an extremely lethal combination. So much so that every Russian male has a roughly 25-30% chance of dying, one way or another, thanks to alcohol. The numbers on screen, bear in mind, are from 2012, but note how Russia’s number is ten times higher than America’s.
Researchers estimate that between 1990 and 2001, over half of all adult male deaths in Siberia were caused by alcohol. On top of this, about 30% of all crimes and 72% of all murders in 2017 were related to alcohol, according to the Kremlin. These are staggering numbers, particularly for one of the world’s most highly educated countries, with an upper-middle income, no less.
Unsurprisingly, then, the Russian male life expectancy is just 68 years — closer to Haiti than Germany. The average man in Sweden, Switzerland, or Macau will live a full decade and a half longer. So, why does the government accept this tragic state of affairs?
Surely, even the most corrupt, authoritarian, and malevolent dictator would recognize this for the epidemic it is, if only out of self-interest. Well, as it turns out, serious efforts have been made in the past. During Soviet times, authorities estimated that Russians spent 15-20% of their incomes on vodka alone.
And no fewer than 75% of work absences were attributed to alcohol. In response, Gorbachev — a non-drinker himself — launched the strictest crackdown before or since. Prices were increased, manufacturing restricted, rules tightened, and curfews enforced.
Entire vineyards were even destroyed by the state. It worked. Almost immediately, consumption fell by about 25%, and, more importantly, it shifted from vodka to beer.
In less than 3 years, the male life expectancy increased by 3. 2 years. For women, 1.
4. There was just one problem: or, rather, 28 billion — the number of rubles the government lost in tax revenue, which, as Mark Schrad points out in his book “Vodka Politics,” was roughly equivalent to Russia’s total loss from the collapse of world oil prices. The Soviet Union, at the time, truly ran on vodka — the tax revenue from which funded 25% of the government’s budget.
So, left with no other choice, Gorbachev rolled back the campaign in 1988, just three years after it began. But it was too late. To fund the deficit, the Soviet Union began printing money, which broke the state-run economy, which led to shortages, which, in turn, caused its total collapse.
It would be too simplistic to say the anti-alcohol campaign brought down the Soviet Union. But experts generally agree that it contributed, at the very least, to its demise. Then, just when you thought things couldn’t possibly get worse, they did.
After 1991, alcohol suddenly became extremely cheap and even more accessible. In other words, the floodgates were opened after 3 years of pent-up demand at the exact moment Russians were at their most hopeless. If they drank profusely before, now they were off the charts.
Consumption soared as they made up for lost time …and then some. Over two decades later, Putin’s political placeholder, President Medvedev, tried again, this time with more modest reforms — mandating health warnings, cracking down on DUIs, and, if you can believe it, reclassifying beer as “alcohol,” rather than mere “food” product. But, once again, during its economic downturn in 2014 when it was in dire need of extra revenue, many of these measures were reversed.
In the meantime, Russians turned to all manner of far more dangerous alcohol substitutes. The lesson? Don’t touch alcohol restrictions with a ten-foot pole.
They’re costly, they’re wildly unpopular, and they don’t work. During the Great Recession, Russia’s finance minister removed any doubt about the government’s true motives, saying the best thing ordinary citizens could do to help the economy was drink more. And one final cherry on top: a popular brand of Russian vodka is named after Putin — who ironically, is a teetotaler like Gorbachev.
Now, Russia almost certainly stands more to lose from encouraging alcohol consumption than it does to gain from taxing it. As early as 2006, Putin declared the demographic crisis to be Russia’s “most important problem. ” Two decades later, he continues to say similar things, most recently on his trip to Anadyr.
And this isn’t just empty rhetoric. The country’s “Maternity Capital” program encourages population growth by giving new families a one-time payment for giving birth to or adopting a child. Still, these are relatively easy, low-risk policies — and, frankly, likely not all that effective.
Whenever this demographic goal conflicts with any other goal, the latter inevitably wins. Year after year, Putin has made short-term decisions that aggravate the problem and mortgage Russia’s future. Take healthcare, for example.
In a recent report, Russia ranked last out of 55 countries for healthcare efficiency. Hospitals are so dirty, corruption so rampant, and medical practices so outdated that many people, especially those outside of major cities, avoid seeking care altogether. At no time was this more on display than during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Distrustful of the government, people avoided vaccines. Today, a smaller share of its population is fully vaccinated than the lowest U. S.
state — Wyoming. As a result, as many as 1 million Russians may have died of the virus, according to outside estimates. If true, this would make it one of the highest per-capita death rates in the world.
Rather than fund its outdated hospitals, the government diverts money toward the military. Estimates of Russian casualties from its war with Ukraine range between 100,000 and 500,000 — in either case, a massive chunk of the demographic its economy needs the most. Not to mention: countless families have fled the country since the war began — likely 1-2 million, including 200,000 in the first 10 days of the invasion alone.
Keep in mind that only 29% of the population — the elite — hold a passport. Those who are leaving, in other words, are disproportionately young, wealthy, well-educated, and have skills in high demand. The loss of 100,000 software engineers, on its own, will cause chaos in Russia’s once-thriving technology industry.
Add all this up — alcohol use, declining birth rates, the poor state of healthcare, the pandemic, war, and the subsequent exodus, and Russia has a serious problem. It’s running out of people. In 2020 and 2021, its population declined by over a million.
And the worst may still be yet to come. Again, none of this was unforeseeable, which only makes the Russian government’s inaction that much more concerning. Perhaps it should have taken the “Understanding Graphs” course on today’s sponsor, Brilliant, which culminates in a capstone lesson on population growth.
Brilliant makes learning things like programming, data analysis, AI, and math fun with interactive lessons, puzzles, and challenges. Say you want to learn data analysis — a highly marketable and fast-growing field. A typical online course might look like this — essentially, a digital textbook with lessons on “density functions,” “binomial distributions,” and “the addition rule.
” If you’re lucky, you might watch an unedited 2-hour recorded lecture. Brilliant, on the other hand, guides you through the material step-by-step, with beautifully made and engaging interactive puzzles, interspersed with real projects and challenges that teach you how to analyze, think through, and solve a problem, like how to use what you’ve learned to build a music recommendation algorithm for Spotify. Because each lesson is broken down into bite-sized chunks, learning becomes a daily habit.
Because you’re learning from first principles, you’ll learn universal and transferable problem-solving skills and not just memorize facts. Finally, you’re more likely to actually remember what you learn when what you’re learning is interesting. Imagine that!
Brilliant has courses on how Large Language Models like ChatGPT work, how to program in Python, calculate probability, do calculus, and much, much more. To check out Brilliant completely free for 30 days, click the link on screen now or in the description below — that’s Brilliant. org/PolyMatter.
Doing so will also get you 20% off an annual premium subscription. Go, pick what interests you most, and start learning today!
