Rescuers and volunteers clean up the rubble and search victims after a Russian missile attack in Kyiv, July 8, 2024.
© Efrem Lukatsky / AP / picturedesk.com
Russia’s population decline is a nightmare for Vladimir Putin. Is the war in Ukraine related to it?
We live in a strange time, “an era of pervasive and indefinite de-population.” The world is infected with childlessness. In 2015, fertility rate globally is half what it was in 1965. Most of the people in the world live in societies where fertility is below replacement level. And, as the economist Nicholas Eberstadt wrote, “Human beings have no collective memory of depopulation.” The last instance of large-scale depopulation, the bubonic plague that decimated Eurasia, happened 700 years ago. But this time it is not some cruel disease that threatens the future of humanity but the cultural choices of individuals. It looks as if humans suddenly lost the desire to reproduce. Rapid depopulation looks like a catastrophe wrapped in mystery. It is not easy to explain why fertility is declining and population is shrinking simultaneously in rich and poor states, in secular and religious societies, in democracies and autocracies.
In his book The Tragic Mind, the geopolitical thinker Robert Kaplan asserts that “while an understanding of world events begins with maps, it ends with Shakespeare.” But could it be that an understanding of the world today starts with demographic charts? Do alarming demographic trends, real and imagined, explain one of the secret reasons why President Vladimir Putin started the war in Ukraine and why and how President Volodymyr Zelensky would decide to end it?
Reversing Russia’s negative demographic trends has been a top priority for Putin from the first day he entered Kremlin. Since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia has lost 17 million people. It also is the country in the world with the most striking gender gap in mortality. In 2021, Russian women tended to live almost 12 years more than Russian men. We should consider whether Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was an admission of the failure of his pro-natalist policies. As Eberstadt remarked, “The most successful population program that the Kremlin has had has been annexing neighboring territories, not increasing the birthrate.” By illegally incorporating Crimea into Russia in 2014, Putin added around 2.4 million ethnic Russians to his country’s population.
Conceiving demographic decline as a threat akin to total war and attributing population loss to the West’s cultural subversion policies are the two defining features of Putin’s political thinking. Understood in this context, Russia’s war in Ukraine is an especially brutal version of what is sometimes called “extinction rebellion.” Like radical environmental activists who glue themselves to the sidewalk, Russia’s leader has embraced shockingly disruptive tactics to stave off what he sees as the ultimate catastrophe: the sweeping away of his people and their culture.
The Soviet Union had a positive project for the future; today, by contrast, there is nothing utopian about the Kremlin’s vision of the future—it is entirely dominated by fear. Demographic data and forecasts are the main drivers of Putin’s attempt to arrest the perceived downward spiral of Russia’s demographic fate by depriving Ukrainians of any home but Russia.
We can only imagine how Putin felt when standing in front of the UN’s estimates according to which Russia’s population will have shrunk to between 74 million and 112 million in 2100, an astonishing drop from the current 145 million.
Demographic imagination has replaced ideological imagination. Demographic imagination offers a very different version of the 21st-century society we know now. It breeds fear rather than hope. And while demographic projections are often wrong, they shape expectations. In the world of tomorrow, Russia will be a territorial giant and population dwarf. That is what Putin understands. Russia’s population will not only be much smaller than that of China, India, or the United States but also half that of Brazil and Ethiopia and one-third that of Nigeria and Pakistan. For someone like Putin, who sees population size primarily in security terms, demographic decline means an irreversible loss of power. As he stated in 2020, “Russia’s destiny and its historic prospects depend on how numerous we will be.”
If the imperialist wars of yesterday were motivated by Malthusian fears that growing populations would lack adequate natural resources, and if European empires were mesmerized by Ukraine’s black earth as the “breadbasket of Europe,” Putin’s new imperialistic war is fueled by his worries that Russia contains too few people to take advantage, for example, of the new opportunities for mineral exploration and extraction in the Arctic region due to thawing of the permafrost. The land wars of the 20th century have been succeeded by the population wars of the 21st century.
It is emblematic that the war in Ukraine has involved the large-scale abduction of children, particularly of orphans, who have been transported to Russia and adopted by Russian parents, based on rushed-through legislation. These newly minted Russians were central to the way Putin defined the objectives of his “special military operation.” Ukrainians were to be treated as a “reserve army” of future Russians destined to increase not simply Russia’s population but also to reverse the expected decline of the Slavic majority inside the country, keeping in mind that any future immigration will mostly come from non-Russian neighbors that once were part of the former Soviet Union and that some of the country’s minority groups have higher birthrates than ethnic Russians do.
We should understand Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine not only as an effort to reverse Russia’s population decline but also as his way of combating what he sees as a Western conspiracy to make Russia “childless.”
The Kremlin, in a similar fashion to its right-wing allies around the world, prefers to portray low birth rates as a consequence of Western feminism and LGBTQ-friendly policies that are purportedly designed to reduce the Russian population. In the Kremlin’s political imagination, Western civilization is in unstoppable decline, having lost its energy and vitality, and Europe has started to look like old people’s nursing home managed by migrants. And therefore the West wants to transform younger and more energetic civilizations by arresting their demographic potential so as to preserve its power. Putin and his elites blame a brazenly self-important West, especially the United States, for foisting a liberal cultural and political model on Russia’s “historically distinctive civilization.”
Unlike some of his political allies in the West, Putin has never quoted the French philosopher René Girard, but he would agree with him that the world is threatened by appocalyptic mimetism. Russian women do not want children, not because they mistrust the Russian state or because they look for different personal realization but because they imitated the choices of the West. In such a view, it is only by breaking the mimetic circuit that Russia can survive.
Russia’s demographic decline, viewed from this perspective, is not a natural process but the result of the West’s war against the country, with the new gender norms advocated by the West deployed as weapons of cultural extermination. It is telling in this regard that other authoritarian regimes, too, have claimed that decadent Western influences are responsible for the decline of the population in their countries. For example, religious authorities in Iran commonly blame “Westoxification” for the lifestyle changes that have drastically reduced the country’s birth rate.
In the 17th and 18th century, some native nations in North America waged “mourning wars”: wars of grief and population replacement, not fought for territory or glory. They conducted raids and kidnapped men and women partly to compensate for the loss of their own people in wars. Those kidnapped who refused to integrate were killed. If these wars were genocidal, they were example of genocidal inclusion.
How different is Putin’s war in Ukraine? Is it not a 21st-century version of the mourning wars?
Ivan Krastev is a political scientist, chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, and permanent fellow at the IWM.
Stephen Holmes is the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at New York University and recurrent visiting fellow at the IWM.
