Russia’s Existential Crisis: No Signs Population Drop Will End

Russia is facing a demographic crisis that threatens its very existence.

In the 20 years since the Soviet Union's dissolution, the new Russia has ridden a startling economic trajectory, drastically altering the former communist empire.

But among unexpected developments in post-Soviet Russia, the phenomenon of a declining population has proven most intractable.

Russia is caught in the grip of a devastating and highly anomalous peacetime population crisis, wrote Nicholas Eberstadt, an adviser at the National Bureau of Asian Research, a Washington think tank.