DEMOGRAPHY

THE DEMOGRAPHIC COST OF THE POST-SOVIET TRANSITION

SOURCE. Steven Rosefielde, Premature Deaths: Russia's Radical Economic Transition in Soviet Perspective, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 53, No. 8, December 2001, pp. 1159-1176.

Since 1917, Russia has passed through three periods of radical change in the political and economic system -- the civil war (1918-21), the first decade of Stalin's rule (1929-38), and the post-Soviet transition of the 1990s. Each of these periods has been marked by a sharp fall in living standards and a "population deficit" -- that is, a shortfall in population compared with what would have been expected on the basis of trends in the preceding "normal" period. The population deficit is made up of two components: premature deaths and a deficit in births.

Professor Rosefielde (University of North Carolina) seeks to put the post-Soviet transition in historical perspective by comparing its demographic impact with that of the two earlier upheavals. He calculates the population deficit under Yeltsin by comparing actual population with the forecast presented to the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress in 1993 by W. Wade Kingkade, a demographer at the US Bureau of the Census.

Thus Russia's actual population at the end of 1998 was 146.7 million. Kingkade predicted that it would be 150.7 million. However, Kingkade underestimated population gain from migration. As he is interested only in births and deaths, the author uses the prediction that Kingkade would have made had he known the true migration figures -- 152.8 million. This gives a population deficit for 1990-98 of 6.1 million, which is attributed to 3.4 million premature deaths and a deficit of 2.7 million births. Of course, a later cut-off date would give somewhat higher figures.

The population deficits for the earlier periods of radical change under Lenin and Stalin were greater by a factor of about 3 -- 19.7 million for 1918-23 and 19.6 million for 1929-38. Professor Rosefielde evidently does not consider the difference great enough to invalidate the political parallel he draws between Yeltsin on the one hand and Lenin and Stalin on the other.