+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Culture (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-49.html)
+--- Forum: Do-It-Yourself (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-131.html)
+--- Thread: Russia's demographic collapse: Empty villages and vanishing men (DIY freefall) (/thread-18352.html)
Russia's demographic collapse: Empty villages and vanishing men (DIY freefall) - C C - Jul 9, 2025
BLINDED BY LOGIC
https://youtu.be/lekhMSjqxt8
VIDEO EXCERPTS: This is the story of Russia, a nation caught in a demographic death spiral, so severe, so complex, and so brutally accelerated by its own actions that it is now facing a future of irreversible decline. This isn't just about a shrinking population. It's a structural collapse, a hollowing out of its heartland, a vanishing of its men, and a free fall into a future where Russia is older, smaller, sicker, and weaker than at any point in its modern history.
As of 2024, Russia's official population stands at just under 144 million people. About 5 and a half million fewer people than they had at their peak in 1991. But even that population number is a mirage masking a deep fragility underneath.
The seeds of this collapse were planted long ago, but especially in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, a decade that was a period of chaos and economic shock and social despair that led to a demographic catastrophe...
[...] But at the core of Russia's demographic tragedy is the fate of its men. Long before the war, Russia was already a nation where men died young at an astonishing rate. In 2021, the average life expectancy for a Russian man was just 68 years old [...] And researchers estimate that one in four men die before the age of 55, largely due to alcohol related causes.
Beyond that, Russia faces other crises that disproportionately affect men as well, including high rates of industrial accidents, suicides, and one of the largest HIV and AIDS epidemics outside of Africa with over 1.5 million people infected.
While men were vanishing from the demographic map, the land itself was emptying out.
Russia is the largest country on Earth, but its population is highly centralized, clinging to a few major urban centers, while the vast heartland withers and dies. [...] By some estimates, around 20,000 communities in Russia have now been entirely abandoned, and 36,000 others have fewer than 10 residents in them. Their wooden houses are slowly collapsing into the earth. The pull of these megacities is stripping the country bare.
The Moscow metro area only occupies about 2% of Russia's land, but holds nearly 15% of its entire population. And this creates an unsustainable model with overcrowded cities and decaying rural areas.
[...] Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine acted as a massive tanker of gas poured directly onto the flames of Russia's demographic fire, possibly pushing the nation past a point of no return. The first and most brutal impact, of course, was military casualties. Western intelligence agencies and independent analysts estimate that as of mid 2025, the number of Russian soldiers killed or wounded is now around 1 million, according to multiple sources.
But the men who died on the battlefield are only part of the story. The other is the men and women who fled. The announcement of a partial mobilization in September 2022 triggered a historic exodus of Russia's best and brightest. In the months that followed, it is estimated that up to 1 million people, mostly young and educated and skilled professionals, fled the country. This included 100,000 IT specialists, a staggering 10% of Russia's entire tech workforce, who left in 2022 alone.
So, Russia is losing its men on the war front, while losing its future due to brain drain. These are the computer programmers, the doctors and the entrepreneurs needed to build a modern economy. They're not just gone. They are now contributing their skills and building families in other countries. A direct loss to Russia's tax base and its future.
[...] The long-term consequences of these losses are enormous. Every man killed or that leaves due to the war is a man who will never have children. And that will in turn crater birth rates for decades to come....
Russia’s demographic collapse: Empty villages, vanishing men, and a nation in freefall ... https://youtu.be/lekhMSjqxt8