The Birth and Death of Moscow

In the 1970s, the demographic situation in the Soviet Union began to change. A baby boom, albeit smaller than in the United States, followed victory in 1945. The Soviet population began to grow as births surpassed deaths. By the mid-1970s, however, the gaps between births and deaths began to close, meaning that natural population growth began to slow. The rate of infant mortality began to rise, and deaths by “unnatural causes” resulted in shorter life expectancies, particularly for working-age men. Woman still gave birth to children, but it was not enough to compensate for the growing death rate. Lower birth rates prevailed in the big cities, meaning migration was the number one cause of population growth.

Above, the graph demonstrates that birth rates in Moscow continued to increase throughout the 1970s and 1980s. While births in 1971 totaled approximately 90,000, over 120,000 children were born in the capital in 1984. Even as the death rate rose, there were consistently about 20,000 more births than deaths, resulting in a slight natural population growth. The chaos of perestroika changed this pattern. Deaths increased due to stress and lack of access to medical care in the uncertainty of the times. The lack of stability also caused a sharp drop off in the birth rate. In the height of the post-Soviet chaos, deaths surpassed births by 87,000.

The graph above compares natural population growth with migration related population growth. In comparison to migration, births accounted for only a small percentage of Moscow's population increase. Throughout the 1970s, migration population growth held steady at about 85,000 people a year, but in 1984, migration lagged to only 65,000. Perestroika did not affect migration as it had births and deaths. Instead, it was the breakup of the Soviet Union that reversed the course of migration. Moreover, migration rebounded much faster. By 2002, deaths still surpassed births, although less so than it had in previous years.

This graph shows Moscow's incredible population increase. Even with the demographic decline and year to year lags in migration, the Soviet, later Russian, capital, grew at dizzying rates in both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.