The Russian Cross is a term meant to describe the demographic decline Russia had faced since the fall of the Soviet Union when its death rate surpassed its birth rate.
Disclaimer: This article has nothing to do with the Russian Orthodox religion. The "cross" refers to how on the birth/death diagram, the line representing death and the line illustrating births more or less intersect, forming a cross that illustrates the deficit of births Russia has endured.
Russia had a rapidly growing population at the beginning of the 20th century. Still, this growth would suffer the horrendous blows from World Wars, famine, economic failures, and political repression that would send it on the path to demographic collapse in the early 21st century. At the Turn of the Millennium, Russia would have a smaller population than Bangladesh, a country with less than 1/100th the land area.
Also, many nations that were within the Russian/Soviet sphere are facing similar demographic problems, like Belarus
and Ukraine.
Lost Potential
As most people with a cursory glance at history will know, Russia was the largest contiguous empire in the world and a significant power at the dawn of the 20th century, but one with an increasingly outdated societal and economic structure. It had only abolished serfdom in the 1860s, well after most nations had abolished it, but redemption payments and high taxes kept many peasants tied to their landowners. It began industrialization relatively late, with the vast majority of the population being rural peasants with little social mobility at the turn of the century. What factory workers did have lived under miserable conditions and with grueling work hours.
Its leadership, the tsars, remained incredibly out of touch with the changing world and held a deep paranoia toward modernity itself. The last two tsars, Alexander III, and his son Nicholas II, remained committed to the idea of the divine right to rule and autocratic power well after most European nations had adopted some form of parliamentary government. They also held intensely nationalistic and anti-cosmopolitan views toward the non-Russian peoples of their empire, which was made especially apparent by their rampant antisemitism. In a foreshadowing of the damage this resistance to change would later bring, Russia found itself badly beaten in Russo-Japanese War by a nation that had been even more medieval just a couple of generations ago.
However, while late-Tsarist Russia is often depicted as a feudal backwater on a precipice of revolution, an image not helped by its quasi-feudal social system and the aforementioned defeat against Japan, this is not a completely accurate picture. While both Alexander III and Nicholas II were stubbornly reactionary men, Russia did show promise and potential during their reigns.
The last two tsars implemented reforms that brought in industry, the modernization of its infrastructure, and foreign capital. By the 1910s, Russia was the fastest-industrializing country in Europe and was attracting foreign investment. Under Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, the aforementioned redemption payments were gradually rolled back, allowing peasants to buy landholdings of their own.
Russia's political system was also taking baby steps toward a more modern political structure, with Tsar Nicholas establishing a parliamentary government to end the Revolution of 1905. While the 1906 Constitution left the tsar with many autocratic powers, the Empire's electoral system was still restrictive, and the country still had a secret police that would crack down on the opposition, it was nevertheless a step on the road to Russia becoming a constitutional monarchy like Britain, giving (on paper at least) rights Russians had never before had in their history, like unions and freedom of the press.
The country's population was big and getting bigger. According to the 1897 census, the Russian Empire held a population of 125 million people, with the population of Russia itself, roughly 85 million, being much bigger than the 75 million that made up the United States. The country had a birth rate of approximately 6-7 children per woman, meaning it still had quite a lot of room to grow.
French economist Edmond Thery predicted Russia would have over 340 million people by the middle of the 20th century and become the dominant economic power of Europe by that time.
War and Revolution
Russia was making so much progress that the German army feared that if they didn't start a war soon, Russia would overtake them. When war did break out in August 1914, Russians of all classes, creeds, and politics rallied around their tsar and confidently went off to war.Despite the progress of previous years, however, Russians soon found they were woefully unprepared to fight in the First World War. While Russia had a sizable industrial base, it was still not equipped for a total war economy. Too many peasants were taken off the farm and sent to the war front, costing the country farm laborers. The railroads were not equipped to supply either the civilians or the soldiers, who all too often didn't even have the correct ammunition for their weapons. Civilians faced inflation and total economic collapse as food supplies dwindled.
The administration of the war effort was hampered further by corruption and Nicholas' unfortunate decision to take direct command of the army while leaving Empress Alexandria on the throne, which impeded the war effort by repeatedly dismissing government ministers, throwing governance of the war effort into chaosnote
In March 1917, war weariness and disillusionment triggered the February Revolution, toppling the Russian Empire and replacing it with the Provisional Government, which continued the war with no more success than the tsar did. In November 1917, that government was itself toppled by the Bolsheviks. By the time the Bolsheviks sued the Central Powers for peace, roughly 2 million Russians, soldier and civilian alike, had been killed by combat and mismanagement.
But this would not be the end of Russia's troubles.
The resulting Russian Civil War would result in 8 million deaths from a combination of political violence between the Reds and the Whites (along with other factions), horrific war crimes perpetrated by both the Bolsheviks and their opponents, ethnic tensions, the breakdown of supply chains, and the policy of War Communism, which allowed the nascent Soviet government to confiscate grain from peasants. A famine in the Volga region alone killed roughly 5 million people.
Not all the population loss was from death. Approximately 2 million more Russians, many from Russia's old elite and intelligentsia, would flee into exile.
Famine and Repression
In the first few years of the Soviet Union, there seemed to be an economic recovery. While the Soviet government was still an autocratic one-party state, it had allowed some private enterprise under the New Economic Policy (NEP). Despite a slight economic complication known as the Scissor Crisis, by 1928, food and economic growth had recovered to pre-war levels.But the ascendant figure of the Soviet leadership, Josef Stalin, was frustrated by the existence of private landholders, known as kulaks, and Russia's relative industrial backwardness. He believed that collectivizing land and heavy-duty industrialization would modernize Russia and make it competitive with the Western world.
This would be done through brute-force labor and the imprisonment, execution, and deliberate starvation of millions of independent farmers. While Russia expanded its industry, millions of people died in the process, especially as the result of famine. The Holodomor in Ukraine was the most prominent of the famines resulting from Stalin's rapid hyperindustrializationnote , but Kazakhstan and Southern Russia were also hit hard by famine.
As if that wasn't enough, the murder of Sergei Kirov made Stalin even more paranoid about potential internal enemies. The resulting Great Purge led to the deliberate execution of roughly 700,000 people in the 1930s, with a million more deaths in The Gulag due to appalling conditions and overwork.
When the 1937 Soviet Census revealed a population of 162 million people, well below was Stalin hoped the population would be, Stalin took the logical step of imprisoning and executing the statisticians for giving him the numbers he wanted.
And if that wasn't enough, World War II was on the horizon.
Killed For Living Space
In his darkest fantasies, Hitler dreamed of Lebensraum, or living space for the German people. His means of giving the Germans this living space was to transform all of Eastern Europe to the Urals into settler space for the German people, necessitating the deliberate mass murder, enslavement, and forced relocation of tens of millions of Slavs and Jews.While the extermination of Jews would be the most prominent part of the The Holocaust, to the point that these communities were practically destroyed, millions of Gentile Slavs would fall victim to Generalplan Ost. One component of this ghastly campaign was Herbert Backe's Hunger Plan, in which millions of Soviet civilians and soldiers would be denied food. Roughly 3.3 million Soviet POWs would die in Nazi custody alone due to deliberate starvation and slave labor, which was more deaths than American soldiers suffered in all of America's wars. This doesn't include the deliberate massacres and plundering of food, with the Siege of Leningrad being the most infamous example of Nazi starvation.
Due to the military purges and Stalin's reluctance to acknowledge the invasion, the Soviet military was woefully unprepared for Operation Barbarossa when it came. While the Red Army eventually turned the tide and drove the Nazis back, the toll on Russian soldiers was unimaginable. It didn't help that Stalin continued atrocities against his people, such as the execution of political prisoners, the ethnic cleansing of minorities such as Chechens and Volga Tartars, scorched earth campaigns that denied the Germans (and civilians) resources, and the execution of soldiers for any sign of cowardice.
As a result of war, atrocity, famine, and repression, the Soviet Union lost an estimated 26 million people, with some estimates of the death toll going as high as 40 million. And after the war, another famine that resulted from the devastation of war would kill roughly 1 million more people.
To give one an example of the death the Soviet people faced, according to one statistic, a Soviet boy born in 1923 only had a 20% chance of living to 1946.
Stagnation
Stalin's death in 1953 marked the end of serious bloodletting in the Soviet Union, but not repression or the command economy. Under Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet government engaged in numerous economic and social policies that had (at best) middling success while dialing down the oppression a tad. Regarding demographics, the most important project was Khruschyovkas, cheap housing project for the rapidly urbanizing Soviet Union. While they did alleviate the housing shortages, these tiny apartments would lead to smaller families and accelerate the demographic transition.
With Khrushchev's ouster, an Era of Stagnation would come under the tenures of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, when there was little economic or cultural evolution and tons of mismanagement, on top of massive military expenditures and a costly, internationally condemned and increasingly domestically unpopular invasion of Afghanistan. It was during this period that birth rates in the Russian Republic fell below replacement levels, with most of the population growth coming from Central Asia.
Collapse and The New Russia
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, he saw a rusty edifice creaking under the weight of economic decay. And he tried many reforms to revive the decaying system, from glasnost and perestroika to allowing some political franchise. But for various reasons, including low oil prices, the Chernobyl disaster, and rising nationalism, Gorbachev sent the system toward its final collapse. In 1991, after a failed coup by Communist Party hardliners, the Soviet Union dissolved, and Gorbachev was forced to resign.One would assume the Russians would get a new start, but under Boris Yeltsin, the Russians endured another period labeled "economic genocide" by Yeltsin's vice president. In an attempt to bring capitalism to Russia, the (limited) safety net Russians enjoyed was pulled out from under them, health services and the uncompetitive Soviet industries cratered, and the remaining industries fell into the hands of oligarchs and a rising Russian mafia. While there had been organized crime under the Tsar and in the Soviet Union, the chaotic transition to a market economy allowed the Russian mafia to make tremendous gains.
As stated above, birth rates in Russia were already below replacement levels by the 1990s. With the economic collapse and the absence of social services, a decline in living standards, crime, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicidal despair, Russia's death rate rose rapidly while birth rates collapsed even further. The male life expectancy fell below 60 years.
With travel no longer restricted, many Russians packed up and moved to the more stable economies of the West. The most prominent migrants were Soviet Jews who immigrated to Israel and other more tolerant nations after years of repression and discrimination.
Broken Promises
Under Vladimir Putin's early reign, a degree of economic and social stability did return, partly helped by rising oil and gas prices as China and other developing economies expanded. The birth rate slowly began growing, the death rate began to drop, and the growing Russian economy attracted migrants from the former Soviet republics. Putin's government began offering cash bonuses so that families would have more kids. By the early 2010s, it appeared Russia's demographics began to stabilize.However, with the annexation of Crimea and resulting sanctions, the COVID-19 Pandemic (which killed roughly 800,000 people), and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and ensuing war of attrition, which both killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and sent hundreds of thousands running for the hills to avoid mobilization and/or stop being hurt by sanctions, not to mention international sanctions, Russia's demographics once again became negative, with many geopolitical analysts proclaiming Russia will become depopulated within the next few decades.
The severity of Russia's demographic problems is said to have been a catalyst for Putin's efforts to take over Ukraine: on top of Putin wanting more people in his country, the shortage of young men meant the 2020s were Russia's last chance to have a young population after a century of mismanagement, repression, wars and economic disorder gutted generations of young men and their prospects for the future. This appears to be less and less the case as the war went on as Russian forces failed to conquer more than Southern and Eastern Ukraine, with war crimes on both the populations and prisoners of war (including executions) piling up.
