The Last Empire

Nationality and the Soviet Future

Robert Conquest

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780817982515
• eBook ISBN: 9780817982539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

The historical background, the present position, and the future prospects of both the non-Russian and Russian peoples are considered in their many aspects, as are the maneuvers of the Communist regime to suppress, appease, or make use of them. The future of the Soviet Union, and thus of the world, depends greatly on whether, and how, the Communist leadership, whose own ideology has lost most of its appeal, can adjust to a new surge of national feeling. The authors examine the question from many points of view, in a broad conspectus of political, cultural, economic, demographic, and other approaches.

The Demography of Soviet Ethnic Groups in World Perspective

Mikhail S. Bernstam

NORTH AND SOUTH

The Soviet Union, with its population of 273.8 million (as of January 1, 1984), can serve as a demographic model of the world. The Soviets have their own North, represented by the developed Slavic, Baltic, and other European populations. These groups constituted 77.0 percent of the total population of the USSR in 1979, and their average natural increase in the 1970s was 0.56 percent a year. This growth, however, was due exclusively to population momentum, for fertility was below replacement level. Like all other developed populations of the world, Soviet Europeans have experienced a demographic depression and face the long-term possibility of eventual depopulation.

The Soviets also have their own South, represented mostly by populations of Turko-Muslim origin and located in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and some parts of the RSFSR. The South comprised 22.7 percent of the total population of the USSR in 1979, with an average annual natural increase in the 1970s of 2.14 percent—four times that of the North. The rate of natural increase of the indigenous Central Asians was 3.29 percent a year—that is, 5.4 times that of the ethnic Russians.¹ The continuing demographic explosion of the Soviet South, which has proceeded despite a rapid and significant economic development, resembles the situation in many developing countries.

The simultaneousness of demographic depression in the North and demographic explosion in the South has created a Malthusian conflict of food and population, since the North is responsible for the bulk of industrial and agricultural production in the country. It is rather ironic that this Malthusian dilemma has become the chief problem of economic development for the major Marxist states in the 1970s and 1980s (the USSR and the People’s Republic of China). The ethnodemographic balance of the Soviet Union is also at stake. The Soviets themselves are most concerned with the prospect of the eventual depopulation of the Northern ethnic groups, which will start between the years 2000 and 2010, according to their own estimates.²

Other explosive problems are declining social mobility and difficulties in financing the welfare state, especially its social security component. Thanks to the inefficiency of their employment system, the Soviets recognized a few years ago the same mathematical theorem that Americans and West Europeans currently are discussing in the social security debate: the dependency burden on working generations is high when fertility is high, but it is even higher when fertility is low. The demographic explosion of the South and the demographic depression of the North both lead to an increasing share of consumption in the national income, widening of capital, and a rise in the price of resources relative to the price of human inputs. These, in turn, impose new constraints on economic growth and technological advancement and eventually reduce the standard of living. Since, in addition to the internal problems of the North, the rapidly growing South is and will continue to be significantly dependent on the North, the situation may not be a question of who will overpower whom, but rather of a joint, long-term, economic decline.

DATA AND METHODOLOGY

A number of purely technical problems have to be solved before a historical and theoretical analysis of the demography of Soviet ethnic groups can be presented. The state of the data is such that statistics must be calculated or recalculated before meaningful questions can be asked. All territorial units of the USSR, that is, the union republics, autonomous republics, and so on, represent heterogeneous populations for which irregular series of vital data are available.³ These data have to be recalculated into series for homogeneous populations, that is, ethnic groups. The Soviet censuses of 1959, 1970, and 1979 provide only erratic and inconsistent data on nationalities that are not comparable from one point in time to another. Regional life tables of the urban population only are available for 1974⁴—a year close to the peak in the trend of changing Soviet life expectancy.⁵

The new formula of computing expectancy for life at birth in any population, established by Preston and Coale, could not be used here because of the lack of relevant data on age distribution.⁶ A regression model proposed by Mazur⁷ was used in this article for calculating ethnic life expectancies. From these data, with the use of Coale and Demeny’s Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (Model East), survivorship ratios were derived for females at the mean age of childbearing (MEAN). (MEAN values for nationalities are calculated from the ethnic age-specific fertility schedules for 1975-76.) These ratios were adjusted in congruence with known survivorship ratios for the USSR as a whole (from the 1959, 1970, and 1979 censuses)⁸ and interpolated for single interim years. Net reproduction rates were then calculated for ethnic groups.

Total fertility rates were transferred from the data on territorial units to ethnic groups by the simple method described by Coale, Anderson, and Harm,⁹ with the use of their estimates of the underreporting of births in Muslim areas and with age-distribution adjustments from the 1970 census in accordance with Biraben’s computations.¹⁰ Since ethnic spatial distribution changes in the last two decades were not significant enough to affect ethnic / territorial fertility ratios, the 1969-70 ratios were assumed to be constant, with adjustment for the differences in Muslim birth underreporting for 1958-59, 1965-66, 1967-68, and from 1969-70 on. Surprisingly, it was found that the Soviets made no significant improvement in fertility registration in Central Asia through the 1970s if the estimates from Coale et al. for 1969-70 are compared with the 1970s fertility schedules and Feshbach’s calculations on children aged 0 to 9 (from the 1979 census).¹¹

Age-specific marital schedules for five-year female age groups for fifteen major nationalities were calculated from the 1970 census and used for the entire 1970s (due to the lack of data from the 1979 census), although the proportion of women currently married declined in the 15-19 and 20-24 age groups.¹² On the basis of (1) the 1970 schedules, (2) the ethnic / territorial fertility ratios, and (3) territorial age-specific fertility schedules calculated with the use of Bongaarts’s index, the index of proportion of women married at ages 15-49 and the totals defined here as “age-specific marital fertility rates accumulated by age” (AMFR) were derived.¹³ Then Coale and Trussell’s Model Fertility Schedules techniques were applied to all these data.¹⁴ Both marital and overall age-specific fertility rates by ethnic groups were computed so that three variables would fit: (1) total fertility rates of ethnic groups, (2) AMFR, and (3) median values of m, the index of the degree of departure from natural fertility. The fit was made by the least squares method.

A modified version of Bongaarts’s model of fertility and birth control was applied to compute ethnic schedules of pregnancies terminated by births and averted by contraception, spontaneous abortions, induced abortions, and by pathological secondary infertility.¹⁵ The results in this article are on the conservative side; the model used derives as its index of the proportion currently married the ratio of total fertility to the AMFR, and this provides for the minimum values of abortions, their aftereffects, and contraception. More realistic values could be derived if the index of marriage were converted into the index of the proportion of the total female population under stable hazardous conditions. This could be done by incorporating data on consensual unions and other arrangements, with the average coital frequency, into the age-specific marital rates. For this purpose, and for reconstructing the 1979 marital schedules from the available data, the Coale and Coale-McNeil model could be used.¹⁶ This, however, remains a subject for further research.

Soviet censuses, like those in many other countries, provide data on ethnic groups based on the personal statements of the respondents. In a multiethnic country, significant nationality reidentification takes place, and all vital rates for ethnic groups are biased accordingly. (Whether this process is a genuine assimilation or a change on paper is of no concern here.)¹⁷ A new method was developed to evaluate similarity and dissimilarity in the growth rates of different ethnic groups within given territorial units and to reconcile ethnic and territorial growth rates in an intercensal time span.¹⁸ The method yielded satisfactory results (compared with those derived by using conventional techniques) in cases of low spatial redistribution of a given nationality. It failed otherwise (for Armenians, Chechens, and a few other minority cases), and it also failed in the case of a nationality that resides in a very heterogeneous territorial unit (the Kazakhs). In those cases conventional projections were used to approximate the adjustments for ethnic reidentification. Using earlier established fertility patterns and model life tables, control tests were made to compare the results of the new and conventional methods. For example, the number of ethnic Russians in 1979 calculated by the new method was 133,487,000 and the number calculated by conventional techniques was 132,964,000 (the census figure was 137,397,089, reflecting the fact that Russians are the main target of in-assimilation). The computed growth rates from 1959 to 1970 and from 1970 to 1979 yielded adjusted numbers for various Soviet populations on the dates of the different censuses. The total of the numbers for all ethnic groups did add up to the total USSR population according to the censuses.

The ethnic distribution of the USSR for 1970—the year of the smallest proportion of females of prime childbearing age in all Soviet populations—was adjusted for nationality reidentification and projected to the years 1984, 2000, 2050, and so on for high, medium, and low series. Various aspects of the issues and techniques of projections are developed in the works of Brass, Keyfitz, Coale, Bourgeois-Pichat, and Lee.¹⁹ Some of the premises of these works, especially their discussion of fertility cycles, are implicitly incorporated in my work. The total Soviet population from the medium projection series (the only series presented in this article) is estimated at 299.0 million in the year 2000—only slightly higher than 297.5 million, the conventionally projected figure of the Foreign Demographic Analysis Division of the U.S. Bureau of the Census.²⁰

ETHNODEMOGRAPHIC STRUCTURE

Background

In 1917 the former Russian empire, with a population of 174.6 million (excluding Finland and the net World War I losses), was a predominantly European country, with nationalities of Slavic, Baltic, and Ugro-Finnic origin constituting about 85 percent of the total (see Table 1). After several border changes, wars, domestic devastations, and famines, and decades of demographic transition, the balance sheet shows a relatively modest growth of nationalities of the North from about 140.2 million in 1927 (in the present borders) to 173.0 million in 1959. Some ethnic groups of the South, such as the Uzbeks, Azeris, Kirgiz, Turkmen, Tadzhiks, and Tatars, almost doubled in the aggregate from 1917 to 1959, increasing their share in the total population from 5.1 percent to 8.3 percent.

By the end of the 1950s the present ethnodemographic structure of the USSR was established. Northern growth started to decline very rapidly, and ethnic Russians moved from a solid to a bare majority of the total population (54.7 percent in 1959 and 50.9 percent in 1979 after adjustment for assimilation). The share of the South increased from 17.0 percent in 1959 to 22.7 percent in 1979, and that of the predominantly Muslim Southeast increased from 13.0 percent to 18.2 percent. (The population of Muslim origin, adjusted for assimilation, numbered 44,545,000 in 1979, that is, 17.0 percent of the total.) The seven major Muslim nationalities of Central Asia and Transcaucasia (Uzbeks, Tad-zhiks, Kazakhs, Kirgiz, Turkmen, Azeris, and Karakalpaks) rose from 16.1 million in 1959 to 31.7 million in 1979, almost doubling in a twenty-year period.

TABLE 1

SELECTED ETHNIC GROUPS AS PERCENTAGES OF THE TOTAL USSR POPULATION

SOURCES: For 1917, see the 1917 census: Istoriia SSSR, no. 6 (1961), pp. 97–115, and no. 3 (1980), pp. 88–89. Ethnic distribution is proportionally adjusted according to net World War I losses. See also M. S. Bernstam in Le Messager, no. 128 (1979), pp. 323–26, 353-54. For 1927, see the 1926 census: Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1926g., vol. 17 (Moscow, 1929), pp. 8–14. For 1937, see the 1937 census (USSR total) and the 1939 census (ethnic distribution): Naselenie SSSR 1973: Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1975), p. 7; Pravda, 29 April 1940, p. 2; and Sovremennye etnicheskie protsessy v SSSR (Moscow, 1977), pp. 487–89. Since USSR and ethnic totals in the 1939 census are significantly inflated, the 1939 ethnic distribution was projected according to the USSR total from the 1937 census. For 1959, see the 1959 census, vol. SSSR, pp. 184–88. For 1970 and 1979, see Table 2. For ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor’s Foreword, Robert Conquest
• Contributors
• Nationalism and Bolshevism in the USSR
• Russian Nationalism in Historical Perspective
• Russian Nationalism and Soviet Politics: Official and Unofficial Perspectives
• Nationalism in the Soviet Empire: The Anti-Semitic Component
• The Prospects of National Bolshevism
• Russian National Feeling: An Informal Poll
• Soviet Minority Nationalism in Historical Perspective
• The Ukraine and Russia
• The Baltic States
• The Soviet Muslim Borderlands
• Minority Nationalism Today: An Overview
• Language, Culture, Religion, and National Awareness
• Social and Economic Aspects of the Nationality Problem
• The Demography of Soviet Ethnic Groups in World Perspective
• Eastern Europe Within the Soviet Empire
• Nationalism in the USSR and Its Implications for the World