Russia’s population dropped by over half a million people between January 2020 and January 2021, the country’s Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) revealed on Thursday. The drop is the largest on record since 2005.

According to Rosstat, Russia’s population was documented as 146.238 million people as of January 1, 2021. A year ago, that number was 146.748 million. Russia’s state news agency TASS described the drop as the “first dramatic decline” since 2005, and the first time since 2017 that the population dropped to under 146.8 million people.

Russia, whose economy has been stagnant for decades under the poor management of President Vladimir Putin, faced extraordinary challenges in 2020, as did most of the world in the face of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. Russia has documented 3.8 million cases of Chinese coronavirus as of Friday, one of the world’s highest rates of infection particularly in light of allegations that the Russian government had undercounted its cases. Moscow has attributed 71,054 deaths to the virus.

The Moscow Times noted that the pandemic appeared to significantly hurt the nation’s population, contributing to a “record-setting 184,600 excess deaths between January and November.” During that same time, 1.9 million Russians died in total.

“At the same time, birth rates declined by 4.4% from 1.36 million from January-November 2019 to 1.3 million in the same period of 2020,” the Times added.

Russian officials addressed the pandemic, much like officials elsewhere, by limiting economic activity to lessen contact that could facilitate infection, which has hindered its economic growth. Concerns about public health, a limited job market, and growing disenchantment with the government that is fueling the opposition movement of dissident Alexei Navalny appear to be factoring into Russia’s low birth rate and migration statistics, and thus the decline in population.

Russian propaganda network RT noted on Thursday that Russia’s population peaked in 2018; unlike neighboring countries facing population crises like China and Japan, Russia has already reached a point of overall population decline. Putin has attempted in the past to facilitate immigration to Russia, RT claimed, but the move has largely failed, partly due to travel limitations in the pandemic era.

RT did not note that Russia’s economy does not appear to be offering much to migrants. Among Rosstat’s other revelations this week is the state of the nation’s finances, which has declined significantly in the past year. An estimated 20 million Russians currently live under the poverty line, an increase of 400,000 households. Living standards generally are lower than they have been for a decade.

“Real disposable incomes — a closely tracked indicator of Russian households’ financial wellbeing — dropped by 3.5% in 2020, Rosstat found,” the Moscow Times noted. “They now stand more than 10% below levels recorded in 2013, the last year of solid growth before Russia’s annexation of Crimea and a slump in world oil prices pushed the economy into recession.”

Russian officials and senior economic figures have attempted to portray Rosstat’s latest data as a positive for the Putin regime, noting that, percentage-wise, Russia is faring better than some other countries economically during the pandemic. Construction and agriculture grew as industries in the past year despite pandemic concerns, and unemployment statistically fell, though experts have cast doubt on whether the official figures truly reflect the state of employment in the country. The head of VTB, the second-biggest bank in Russia, said during a conversation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this week that he believed that Russia’s economy would return to its lackluster pre-pandemic performance as soon as fall 2021.

“We feel reasonably optimistic about this and we hope that by autumn the Russian economy will return to the pre-crisis level,” chief executive Andrey Kostin said.

In an early January analysis, the Moscow Times cited economic experts agreeing that Russia has lost less of its economic power than some peer states.

“Other countries are doing much worse,” Russian economist Sergei Guriev is quoted as saying in late 2020. “Advanced economies on average will lose 6% of their GDP — many European economies will lose 10%,” as opposed to Russia’s predicted four percent.

Elina Ribakova, deputy chief economist at the Institute of International Finance (IIF), told the newspaper that Russia appears to be economically viable, but only in short-term indicators.

“In the short-run we have stability — low government debt, low external debt and very high reserves. You’d say this is fantastic, right? But the issue is that over the medium-term we have every possible imaginable problem: an inability to generate growth,” she said.

The lack of significant economic prospects appears to have made the bombshell accusation by Navalny, a dissident who recently suffered an apparently poisoning with the Russian nerve agent Novichok, that Putin has spent billions on a personal palace particularly insulting to Russians. Navalny fled to Germany following his poisoning with the help of his team. There, he recovered from a coma as German doctors investigated the possible origin of his ailment and discovered evidence of Novichok use. A recovered Navalny accused Moscow of poisoning him and vowed to return home despite the Kremlin making clear he would face immediate arrest. Upon landing in Russia last week, police detained him.

Navalny’s team released a report, including video, last week while the opposition leader was behind bars alleging that Putin had spent billions of dollars on a personal palace on the Black Sea.

“There are impregnable fences, its own port, its own security, a church, its own permit system, a no-fly zone and even its own border checkpoint. It is absolutely a separate state within Russia,” Navalny said.

Putin’s denial of any knowledge about the estate has not stopped nationwide protests against his regime, which are expected to continue on Saturday.

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