In case you haven’t heard, Russia has A Dying Population:
The former Soviet Union, with almost 300 million people, was the world’s third-most populous country, behind China and India. Slightly more than half of its citizens lived in Russia. The country has lost the equivalent of a city of 700,000 people every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, only partially offset by an influx of people from other former Soviet republics.A country that sprawls across one-eighth of the globe is now home to 142 million people.
The losses have been disproportionately male. At the height of its power, the Soviet Union’s people lived almost as long as Americans. But now, the average Russian man can expect to live about 59 years, 16 years less than an American man and 14 less than a Russian woman.
Sergei Mironov, chairman of the upper house of Russia’s parliament, said last year that if the trend didn’t change, the population would fall to 52 million by 2080.