Good morning, afternoon, or evening, this is Paul Truesdell, and this is my podcast, which a few years ago I thought I would call The Paul Truesdell Podcast, which sounds better than the Arthur Lamore Finkelstein podcast coming to you from Wallace, Idaho, because, well, since I’m not Arthur Lamore Finkelstein, and we sold the ranch in Wallace, I’d stick with my name, Paul Truesdell, and we’re recording this in Ocala, Florida.  Now if you smiled, chuckled, squinted your eyes, or did a little shake of the head, stick around. If not, thank you for visiting, have a good day.
And so today. together we, you and me, yes just the two of us, are going to examine Russia’s demographic collapse, a slow-moving but decisive factor shaping that nation’s future. Before we consider current legislation and headlines, it is important to establish what demographics are, why they matter, and how Russia’s story illustrates nearly every possible demographic challenge at once.
Demographics, at its core, is the study of populations. It examines how many people are being born, how many are dying, and how groups are distributed by age, gender, location, and other defining factors. It is not only about numbers on a page; demographics explains whether a nation has enough workers to support its retirees, whether it has enough young people to fill military ranks, and whether economic growth is sustainable. Nations rise or fall not only on resources and armies but on whether they can maintain a healthy balance between generations. When those balances are lost, social stability erodes.
In Russia’s case, the demographic situation is grim. It has been deteriorating steadily for more than a century, and three interlocking trends explain why. Interlocking trends are different problems that, while distinct, reinforce and worsen each other. They form a vicious cycle. In Russia, those three trends are industrialization and urbanization, addiction and public health crises, and persistent economic decline. Taken together, they have produced one of the most unsustainable demographic profiles in the modern world.
The first trend is urbanization and industrialization. Across history, whenever nations move from rural, agricultural life into cities and factories, birth rates decline. On a farm, children are economic assets. They help with chores and production, often from a young age. In cities, children become economic costs—requiring education, medical care, and housing in small, expensive spaces. This pattern has been observed in the United States, Japan, Korea, and especially in China under its disastrous one-child policy. In all of these countries, fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels. Yet in Russia the situation is more severe. Industrialization was not a gradual evolution but a forced march under Stalin and Khrushchev. Families were shoved into cramped apartments, often a single room, with no realistic ability to support large families. Agricultural collectivization stripped away personal incentives to work the land or raise children to continue farming traditions. As a result, both the desire and the means to raise multiple children withered.
Generational momentum worsened the decline. Each new urban generation had fewer children than the one before it, while entire gaps appeared in Russia’s demographic structure due to mass deaths in the First and Second World Wars. Millions were killed, millions more were separated from spouses during mobilization, and family formation itself stalled. By the time peace returned, large segments of the population were simply missing. A tree with great branches cut away does not grow back evenly, and neither does a nation’s population pyramid.
Now, a quick coffee break, I’ll be right back.
Hear ye, hear ye, lend me your ears, but keep them on your head and make sure to head over to the Stone Water Club in September and join Paul Truesdell for one or both of his casual cocktail conversations. Held on the second and fourth Sunday of the month, at two thirty in the afternoon, you’ll join a nice size group of like minded men and women who want to know about. Wait, I’m not telling you. Nope. I’m not telling you.  Instead, go to paul Truesdell dot com, click on the events tab, and read about the upcoming topics. Now if that doesn’t get your attention, nothing will.  Okay, with that said, back to Paul. 
The second trend is addiction, both to alcohol and to narcotics. Russia’s relationship with vodka is centuries old, but industrial vodka production made it a cornerstone of daily life. To this day beer is not officially classified as alcohol in Russia, which trivializes consumption and normalizes abuse. Yet the more devastating blow came from drugs. When Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s, they encountered the world’s largest poppy fields. Transportation links between Afghanistan and Soviet territory made heroin accessible, and smuggling routes developed quickly. Three of the world’s four major heroin pipelines ran through Russian territory, and even after the military withdrawal, corrupt officials in places like Tajikistan kept the trade alive. Soldiers meant to guard the borders instead took their share of the profits and facilitated the flow into Moscow. The result was catastrophic: by the 1990s, as many as 10 million Russians were addicted to heroin in a country with fewer than 150 million people.
Addiction kills directly through overdoses, indirectly through disease, and socially by lowering productivity, fueling crime, and eroding family life. Add alcoholism, and you have a culture where death rates remain high, birth rates remain low, and optimism vanishes. Organized crime and a mafia-style government only reinforce the cycle. In Russia, officials profit openly off state enterprises and local monopolies, extracting wealth without accountability. This siphons resources away from health care, housing, and education, leaving ordinary Russians discouraged about starting or sustaining families. Many of the best and brightest have voted with their feet, emigrating to Europe, North America, or elsewhere. The people who remain often struggle with economic survival and see little reason to bring more children into that environment.
Now, another quick coffee break, I’ll be right back.

Hello, I’m back, and not for long. Here’s the reminder. They are called, and you know this already, casual cocktail conversations. You’ve been, great. You haven’t been yet, you’re missing out. Now, finish listening to this podcast and then head over to paul Truesdell dot com. Click on the events tab. Poke around and then make that call or text. Three five two, six one two, one thousand. Got it? Got it. Now put the milk down and write it down. Three five two. Six one two, one thousand.  Ok, Paul, your turn. 

The third interlocking trend is long-term economic decline. The Soviet Union may have been a superpower militarily, but economically it was hollow. After the 1960s, genuine growth and innovation stagnated. Under Brezhnev, the system became ossified, rewarding loyalty rather than productivity. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s plunged millions into poverty. Incomes evaporated, savings disappeared, and social safety nets unraveled. The pattern has not improved. Russia’s post-Soviet economy has been unstable, and the war in Ukraine has created a new contraction. When people believe that tomorrow will be worse than today, they do not invest in the future, and that includes the decision to have children.
This despair feeds into another destructive factor: abortion. Russia has the highest abortion rate in the world. Some studies suggest as many as 70 percent of pregnancies are terminated. Abortion became normalized during the Soviet era as both birth control and population control. In many ways, it was state policy. The consequences are staggering. When a country consistently terminates more pregnancies than it carries to term, its future is mathematically impossible to sustain. China offers a comparable example with its one-child policy, but in Russia the practice has become deeply ingrained culturally, adding yet another layer to demographic decline.
Most recently, the war in Ukraine has accelerated all of these problems. When mobilization began, nearly one million young men fled the country, many of them educated and employable. Another million have since been killed or incapacitated. Losing so many men under 30 devastates both the labor force and the reproductive base of society. This is not a small scratch on the demographic chart; it is another deep gouge, ensuring that Russia’s future population will be even smaller, older, and weaker.
The situation has become so dire that Russia’s parliament, the Duma, is now considering a bill to criminalize the publication of any media that does not glorify childbearing. If a television program shows a woman pursuing a career instead of having children, that could become illegal. For context, this is not a country where satire and reality are easily separated. In the 2000s, several provinces literally criminalized death on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in an attempt to lower the death rate. And believe it or not, it worked—because people stopped reporting deaths on those days. The paperwork said mortality dropped, so on paper, the crisis was solved. George Carlin would have had a field day with that one. Russia’s problem is that its statistics are often Potemkin—facades built to impress outsiders while concealing the truth.
One more quick coffee break, I’ll be right back.

Knock knock.
Who’s there.
Boris.
Boris us who?
Boris want to make baby.
Oh Boris, you bore us to tears. Here’s a bottle, sit down, and chug it down.
And speaking of sitting down, it’s time to make that call so you can relax with a classic cocktail and a classic old school guy, who will lead a couple of classic discussions in September.  Have I got your attention? Good.  So call or text. three five two. Six one two. One thousand.  And with that, I’m done for the day. Paul, your turn again. 
 On demographics, this opacity is especially pronounced. Russia has not published reliable birth or death data in over 15 years. The last serious post-Soviet census in the early 2000s counted 140 million people, but somehow another 4 million appeared in the official figures, bringing the total to 144 million. Today the official count is 141 million, but with war casualties, mass emigration, and underreporting, the real number may be closer to 130 million. The truth is obscured, but the trend line is unmistakable: Russia is shrinking.
The consequences of this shrinkage will be visible on the battlefield before they are tabulated on census forms. If Russia runs out of young men to fight in Ukraine, the demographic collapse will be undeniable. Already, the Kremlin has sought reinforcements from Africa and North Korea, with disastrous results. Foreign units suffered heavy casualties, many were slaughtered outright, and their contributions proved negligible. Russia is scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel, and each year of war accelerates the exhaustion.
At the start of the Ukraine conflict, Russia’s working estimate was a deficit of 8 million people due to emigration and casualties. That number is now down to 6 million, meaning the system can continue to grind forward for a few more years. But the deeper question is how many Russians under 20 exist at all. That number has never been clear, and the war will expose it. Once a nation runs out of young adults, its fate is sealed, because no amount of legislation, censorship, or statistical manipulation can conjure a new generation out of thin air.
Demographics are destiny, and Russia is approaching a cliff. Industrialization, addiction, and economic despair have combined to erode the population. War has accelerated the decline. Abortion has eliminated millions of potential citizens. Emigration has drained the talent pool. And the government’s response is to criminalize television characters who choose not to have children and to pretend that banning death on certain weekdays is a serious policy. The truth is that Russia is running out of people. Once the losses are visible on the battlefield and in the workforce, the rest of the world will see the reality clearly.
That reality is not a question of politics or opinion. It is a matter of numbers, and the numbers do not lie—even if the statisticians do.