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Soviet Union [USSR] Vital Statistics
In the period after World War II, annual population growth
rates gradually declined from a high of 1.4 percent during the
1961-65 period to 0.9 percent, the rate throughout the 1970s and
most of the 1980s. Such a rate of increase is typical for an
industrialized urbanized society, and it closely matched the 1.0
percent growth rate recorded in the United States for the same
period.
Between 1971 and 1986, average life expectancy fluctuated and
actually decreased in some years before stabilizing at about
seventy years (see
table 8, Appendix A). The difference of eight to
ten years between male and female life expectancy in favor of women
was somewhat greater than in most Western countries. Life
expectancy was longest (73.3 years in 1985-86) in the Armenian
Republic and shortest (64.8 years) in the Turkmen Republic.
More than any other demographic index, infant mortality
underscored most sharply the tremendous regional differences in the
population and its health care. Beginning in the mid-1970s,
reporting of infant mortality rates was discontinued; in October
1986, however, Soviet sources revealed that infant mortality rates
had actually increased between 1970 and 1986, from 24.7 per 1,000
to 25.4 per 1,000 births. While the rate for the Russian Republic,
which is generally better supplied with health facilities, declined
by 19 percent, the rate increased for most Soviet Central Asian
republics. In one case, the Uzbek Republic, the rate increased by
almost 50 percent, to 46.2 per 1,000. In 1986 infant mortality was
lowest (11.6 per 1,000) in the Lithuanian Republic and highest
(58.2 per 1,000) in the Turkmen Republic.
Analysts proposed a number of reasons to explain what was
viewed as an abnormally high rate of infant mortality for a
developed country. Among the reasons given was excessive
consumption of alcohol and heavy smoking among women; widespread
use of abortion as a means of birth control, a procedure that could
impair the health of the mother and of children carried to term;
teenage pregnancy; unsanitary conditions; and a deteriorating
health care system
(see Soviet Union USSR - Health Care
, ch. 6).
In the Soviet Union, virtually all national growth has been the
result of natural increase because of traditionally rigid control
over immigration and emigration. Growth, however, varies
considerably from region to region and from nationality to
nationality. In terms of population, there is a clear trend toward
the Soviet Union's becoming more Asian and less European. Birth
rates in parts of Soviet Central Asia are in some cases ten times
higher than birth rates among Slavs. In the intercensal period
1970-78, population growth in the Asian part of the Soviet Union
was almost triple the rate of growth in the European section, 16.8
percent versus 5.9 percent.
Although most facets of the population were dynamic, some
demographic aspects remained constant: women have outnumbered men
since the Bolshevik Revolution, and the overwhelming majority of
the people have opted to live in the cities and on the
collective farms (see Glossary) and
state farms (see Glossary) of the European
part of the country. In more than seven decades of Soviet power,
the population has experienced periodic cataclysmic demographic
events, some of them self-inflicted and some of them of external
origin. These wars, famines, purges, and epidemics have left an
enduring imprint on the society and on its ability to reproduce and
renew itself. The magnitude of human loss in the Soviet Union can
be shown by estimating the 1987 population as if it had grown at a
relatively modest annual rate of 1 percent from 1917 to 1987. At
that rate, the population would have reached approximately 325
million citizens by the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik
Revolution. Instead, that figure is expected to be reached only in
2016, a delay of more than one generation. The difference between
this estimate of 325 million and the actual population in 1987 of
281 million suggests that some 45 to 50 million lives were lost in
wars, famines, forced collectivization, and purges.
The single most devastating event by far was World War II,
commonly referred to in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War
(see Soviet Union USSR - The Great Patriotic War
, ch. 2). Estimates vary, but an
absolute population decline of some 20 to 25 million seems quite
plausible. There were 194 million people reportedly living in the
Soviet Union in 1940. Only 209 million were counted by the census
of 1959 instead of the roughly 234 million that might have been
expected, given a moderate rate of growth. Since the end of the
war, the population has increased by more than 100 million.
Data as of May 1989
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