Rosstat just released its latest tranche of demographic data, including its first estimate of Russia’s population as of January 1, 2015. When you subtract out Crimea, as I think is perfectly appropriate to do, the total population was just short of 144 million, or 143,975,923 if you want to be precise.

This represents an increase of about 275,000 on last January’s estimate of 143.7 million. That is decidedly lower growth than Russia recorded during 2013, but as the following chart shows it’s still a heck of a lot better than most of its post-Soviet history, when, even accounting for immigration, the country regularly lost more than 500,000 people a year. As bad as the demographic outlook might be at the moment, it was much worse in the not too distant past.

However, the downward trend in growth is quite worrisome and strongly suggests that there could be trouble on the horizon. There is mounting anecdotal and statistical evidence that Russia’s increasingly severe economic problems are already having a negative impact on its birth rate and on the level of immigration from the rest of the “near abroad:” births in November were down by more than 5% year-over-year, and immigration is on pace to decrease by more than 10%.

This presents obvious problems since Russia’s (modest!) population resurgence has largely been achieved through increases in births and immigration. The death rate has decreased, but not by nearly as much as the birth rate as grown. Simple math says that, with fewer births and fewer immigrants, Russian population growth won’t be nearly as robust as it had been.

Discussions about Russian demography usually veer into abstract ideological debates about “the Russian soul” or whether the country has “confidence in its own survival,” but the simple reality is that the modest demographic improvements seen over the past eight years reflected a substantial improvement in the average Russian’s personal economic security. As Russia’s economy was growing, wages were increasing, jobs were plentiful, and housing was, if not readily available, than a lot more available than it had been in the past. Russian workers might not have had it great in comparison to their Western peers, but they had it a lot better than at any other point in their history. The rather banal result of this, still rather modest, economic bounty was that people felt more comfortable starting and expanding families and that lots of “guest workers” form the rest of the former Soviet Union moved to Russia to find jobs.

However now that Russia’s economy is set for a nasty recession of indeterminate length, and now that real incomes are getting hit by a combination of currency weakness and inflation, it’s not terribly surprising that its population dynamics are starting to weaken. That’s exactly what you’d expect to happen when a country suffers a sharp short-term economic reversal. Despite the Kremlin’s loud protestations of exceptionalism Russia is not, in fact, all that different: when you hammer the population’s standard of living they react accordingly.

Where is Russia’s population headed from here? Well, that’s largely a function of how the economy performs and that, in turn, is largely a question about the price of oil. If oil rebounds to $70 or $80 a barrel by the end of the year, as a number of forecasters expect, then the demographic impact of the economic downturn will be noticeable but not nearly enough to quality as a “shock.” If oil stays at the current level or heads lower then I expect there will be a very noteworthy and very negative impact on the growth rate, perhaps even a return to modest overall population loss.

Opinions will differ as to which of those two scenarios is more likely, but Russia’s demographic dynamics hinge on its the real-world performance of its economy, not any kind of ideological debate.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2015/01/23/russias-population-is-still-growing-but-trouble-lies-ahead/