Good morning, afternoon, or evening, this is Paul Truesdell, and this is my podcast, which a few years ago I thought I would call The Paul Truesdell Podcast, which sounds better than the Arthur Lamore Finkelstein podcast coming to you from Wallace, Idaho, because, well, since I’m not Arthur Lamore Finkelstein, and we sold the ranch in Wallace, I’d stick with my name, Paul Truesdell, and we’re recording this in Ocala, Florida. Now if you smiled, chuckled, squinted your eyes, or did a little shake of the head, stick around. If not, thank you for visiting, have a good day.
And so today. together we, you and me, yes just the two of us, are going to examine Russia’s demographic collapse, a slow-moving but decisive factor shaping that nation’s future. Before we consider current legislation and headlines, it is important to establish what demographics are, why they matter, and how Russia’s story illustrates nearly every possible demographic challenge at once.
Demographics, at its core, is the study of populations. It examines how many people are being born, how many are dying, and how groups are distributed by age, gender, location, and other defining factors. It is not only about numbers on a page; demographics explains whether a nation has enough workers to support its retirees, whether it has enough young people to fill military ranks, and whether economic growth is sustainable. Nations rise or fall not only on resources and armies but on whether they can maintain a healthy balance between generations. When those balances are lost, social stability erodes.
In Russia’s case, the demographic situation is grim. It has been deteriorating steadily for more than a century, and three interlocking trends explain why. Interlocking trends are different problems that, while distinct, reinforce and worsen each other. They form a vicious cycle. In Russia, those three trends are industrialization and urbanization, addiction and public health crises, and persistent economic decline. Taken together, they have produced one of the most unsustainable demographic profiles in the modern world.
The first trend is urbanization and industrialization. Across history, whenever nations move from rural, agricultural life into cities and factories, birth rates decline. On a farm, children are economic assets. They help with chores and production, often from a young age. In cities, children become economic costs—requiring education, medical care, and housing in small, expensive spaces. This pattern has been observed in the United States, Japan, Korea, and especially in China under its disastrous one-child policy. In all of these countries, fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels. Yet in Russia the situation is more severe. Industrialization was not a gradual evolution but a forced march under Stalin and Khrushchev. Families were shoved into cramped apartments, often a single room, with no realistic ability to support large families. Agricultural collectivization stripped away personal incentives to work the land or raise children to continue farming traditions. As a result, both the desire and the means to raise multiple children withered.
Generational momentum worsened the decline. Each new urban generation had fewer children than the one before it, while entire gaps appeared in Russia’s demographic structure due to mass deaths in the First and Second World Wars. Millions were killed, millions more were separated from spouses during mobilization, and family formation itself stalled. By the time peace returned, large segments of the population were simply missing. A tree with great branches cut away does not grow back evenly, and neither does a nation’s population pyramid.
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The second trend is addiction, both to alcohol and to narcotics. Russia’s relationship with vodka is centuries old, but industrial vodka production made it a cornerstone of daily life. To this day beer is not officially classified as alcohol in Russia, which trivializes consumption and normalizes abuse. Yet the more devastating blow came from drugs. When Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s, they encountered the world’s largest poppy fields. Transportation links between Afghanistan and Soviet territory made heroin accessible, and smuggling routes developed quickly. Three of the world’s four major heroin pipelines ran through Russian territory, and even after the military withdrawal, corrupt officials in places like Tajikistan kept the trade alive. Soldiers meant to guard the borders instead took their share of the profits and facilitated the flow into Moscow. The result was catastrophic: by the 1990s, as many as 10 million Russians were addicted to heroin in a country with fewer than 150 million people.
Addiction kills directly through overdoses, indirectly through disease, and socially by lowering productivity, fueling crime, and eroding family life. Add alcoholism, and you have a culture where death rates remain high, birth rates remain low, and optimism vanishes. Organized crime and a mafia-style government only reinforce the cycle. In Russia, officials profit openly off state enterprises and local monopolies, extracting wealth without accountability. This siphons resources away from health care, housing, and education, leaving ordinary Russians discouraged about starting or sustaining families. Many of the best and brightest have voted with their feet, emigrating to Europe, North America, or elsewhere. The people who remain often struggle with economic survival and see little reason to bring more children into that environment.
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The third interlocking trend is long-term economic decline. The Soviet Union may have been a superpower militarily, but economically it was hollow. After the 1960s, genuine growth and innovation stagnated. Under Brezhnev, the system became ossified, rewarding loyalty rather than productivity. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s plunged millions into poverty. Incomes evaporated, savings disappeared, and social safety nets unraveled. The pattern has not improved. Russia’s post-Soviet economy has been unstable, and the war in Ukraine has created a new contraction. When people believe that tomorrow will be worse than today, they do not invest in the future, and that includes the decision to have children.
This despair feeds into another destructive factor: abortion. Russia has the highest abortion rate in the world. Some studies suggest as many as 70 percent of pregnancies are terminated. Abortion became normalized during the Soviet era as both birth control and population control. In many ways, it was state policy. The consequences are staggering. When a country c...
