Demographic crisis on the post-soviet space

Anatoly Vishnevsky, Institute for economic forecasting, Moscow

The main demographic processes, mortality, nuptiality, fertility, and migration, in 15 post-Soviet countries for last 40 years, are examined and the common and specific features of demographic crisis, which these countries go through, are analyzed. This crisis began long before disintegration of the USSR owing to inability of the Soviet society to provide a condition for normal development and accomplishment of the demographic transition, and has been aggravated by the economic and social crisis in the post-Soviet countries in 1990th. The crisis is manifested in incompleteness of epidemiological transition, preservation of archaic structure of the causes of death and high mortality; in delayed and self-contradictory development of new family values and norms of matrimonial and procreative behavior; in aggravating trends of depopulation and ageing; in inability to bring mechanisms of regulation of migrations and the migratory legislation in balance with a new demographic and political reality.