The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Russian Depopulation || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

Today we'll be discussing Russian birth and death rates since we've got some new Russian demographic data to look at. So, go ahead and grab that truckload of salt.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-russian-depopulation

Everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Bell Block, New Zealand. Today we are going to discuss the newest data that's out from the Russians on their demographics. Russia stopped collecting demographic data about 17, 18 years ago, and I've really just been making it up ever since. Now, if you look back through Russian history, there have been a lot of dark chapters, and as a rule when people are depressed, they don't feel it's a good idea that's a good idea, to have a lot of kids. So these giant rises and dips in the Russian birth rate and death rate based on what's going on culturally and economically with the country. Now, the biggest ones, of course, are World War I, World War II. There was a time when Bruce Jeff tried to shove

everyone into small apartments because he thought that was modern. Here we were less room for kids. And then, of course, the biggest one is the post-Soviet colloquium. when the bottom fell out of the Soviet system, and we had an extended period about 20 years where basically nothing got better. You combine this with rampant heroin use and alcoholism that is just atrocious by most modern country measures.

And you get something called a death cross that happened in the 1990s, and that's a point when the birth rate and the death rate cross so that the death rate is higher, and even before you consider incremental mortality, incremental mortality issues, you have population shrinkage. Now a couple things to keep in mind. Number one, the Russians back in the mid-80s had this moment of opening in Parastrayka,

where they thought maybe, just maybe we can save the Soviet system, and there absolutely was a little baby boom. And if you fast forward 25, 30 years to just a few years ago, the children of that baby boom also had kids at a time when Russia was riding high. on high energy prices under Vladimir Putin in the late 2000s. I'm sorry, the late 2010s. And so we got another little mini-bony boom. And so that death cross recrossed into a life cross very, very briefly for a very, very low cross, but it was successful in at least for a couple of years bringing the birth rate back up above the death rate. Well, with the new data,

it is clear that that has now reversed. And remember, this is new data provided by the Russian government is undoubtedly overly optimistic, but even by their own data, they're now back into negative territory. All right. So this takes us two places. Number one, none of the underlying issues that have plagued Russia for the last century have gone away. All of them are more intense. The infrastructure of the Soviet period is still degrading. The Russians have still been unable to rebuild their educational system. Alcoholism is still rife. Drug use is still rife. Oh, I've run out of beach. We're going to go the other way now. And so you shouldn't expect any improvement because it's going to be another 25, 30 years before now the grandchildren of Perestroika could be

born. And so you're dealing more now with the after effects of World War I and World War II and Brezhnev and the post-Soviet collapsed. And it's more like, likely that this period of death cross is going to be far more intense than what we've seen before because all of the younger people are now older, you know, the boom that they had, say, in the 70s, and they're just unable to have children now. The next generation that will be out of enough children, we'll be doing it for another 20 years. And second, and far more intensely is the Ukraine War. As you will notice from this most recent Death Cross, it began before the Ukraine War, before

It began before the Ukraine war, before Russia became a pariah again, before Russia was under the most extreme sanctions that any major country has ever been on, before the Russians started seeing massive battlefield casualties. So we are again in one of those moments in Russian history where people are unsure of their future and they're not having kids in addition to the fact that the demographic moment has already passed from the perestroika boom echo. We are already seen on a daily basis for the last year and a half that more Russian men are dying on the fields of battle in Ukraine than Russian boys are being born. And we've even had a few days where more men have been dying in the fields of Ukraine than the total number of births, boys and girls. So we're seeing the Russians waste their last chance to have positive demographic growth ever. And there's no reason to expect that there's anything in the Russian system that's going to improve the birth rate or decrease the death rate anytime soon. One of the reasons why Russia has been a major power for so long is numbers. They have a lot of, hello, little puppy.

We've had a large country with a lot of ethnic groups and disposing of surplus ethnic groups in the mall of war has long been a Russian strategy for managing their population. They're doing that now, but you can only do that so long, and that always assumes that you have a robust birth rate, which the Russians don't anymore. So the Russians have never been really able to upgrade and update their military strategies in the post-Cold War era to reflect the changes in the demographic picture that just no longer exist and barely haven't existed for decades. So it's all about lots and lots of artillery. It's all about what they call meat assault, just human wave tactics. And that works as long as you massively outnumber your foe, and there are roughly four Russians for every Ukrainian. So it's not a strategy that is stupid, but is a strategy that if you keep using it when you don't have a bottom of supply of fighters, that you really eat into what allows your country to exist in the first place. Now, even with this going on, the Russians have more time on their demographic clock than a country like,

China that has had a rock bottom birth rate now for 40 years. But when you start burning more people in their 20s than you're generating babies, you are definitely on a starvation diet. And the question in my mind has always been when this century does the Russian ethnicity lose sufficient coherence that it can't even maintain a state. If they win the Ukraine war, if they establish a better external buffer system, I would say that it would probably be the 20th century. 70s or 2080s. But if they become stalled in Ukraine, if they get forced into a peace or a battlefield defeat that means that they've expended all of the costs of fighting a major war without getting many of the benefits, then you're looking at this happening 20, 30, maybe even 40

years earlier. So, believe it or not, we're in this weird situation where as long as the Russians are doing this horrific meat assault, it's really good for the rest of the world, unless, of course, the country that's on the receiving end, that would be Ukraine, because it brings forward the day where the Russians just can't fight any longer at all.