Three Factors Driving Down Size of Russian Population, El Murid Says

Paul Goble

Saturday, August 13, 2022

 Anatoly Nesmiyan, who blogs under the screen name El Murid, says that three factors are currently driving down the size of the Russian population: emigration and rising death rates, the first two, are the most obvious, but the third, the decision of Russians not to have children because of conditions in the country, may ultimately be the most consequential.

            Emigration, of course, is a natural response to the military violence and repression the Putin regime has inflicted on the country; and rising death rates reflect not just the aging of the population but the regime’s attack on Russia’s already rickety healthcare system, the blogger says (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=62E37496F1791).

            The decision of potential parents not to have children now or perhaps ever is a product of similar factors. When medical care is uncertain and repression is increasing, such people don’t really know what tomorrow will bring and so postpone or cancel plans for an investment as long-term as having a child.

            All three of these factors, El Murid continues, are the result of the Putin regime behaving in a textbook fashion. “Dying itself, it is poisoning the space surrounding it with its own decay and decomposition, killing all life around it because the regime itself is already a walking corpse.”

Anyone familiar with films about zombies knows that such creatures don’t die easily but do try to drag down as many people around them as possible, “living and not yet born and those who will never be born,” exactly what the zombie regime in the Kremlin now is doing