Between May and July, Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) gradually stopped publishing nearly all key demographic indicators. First to disappear were the real-time regional figures on births, deaths, marriages, and divorces. Then, in late June, Rosstat refused for the first time to release final mortality data for 2024.  

Similar figures for 2022 and 2023 had previously allowed statistician Dmitry Kobak and his colleagues to calculate excess mortality linked to the war against Ukraine — and independently confirm Meduza’s own estimates based on inheritance records. Now, such research is no longer possible, along with many other studies that relied on official data. The independent journalists’ collective Bereg asked a what this level of censorship means — and what Russia’s “last living snapshot” of its demographic picture tells us. Meduza shares a translation of the interview.

— Let’s start with the basics: which key statistics have we lost?

— Nearly all monthly demographic data is no longer being published. First, we’ve lost the absolute figures — births, deaths, marriages, and divorces, including regional breakdowns. That’s the first category: monthly statistics. The second is the detailed annual data on all deaths. Any dataset related to mortality, it seems, will no longer be published due to a government directive. This was done under a new law — the government invoked it and decided to stop releasing mortality data altogether.

Interestingly, we only know this thanks to [statistician] Dmitry Kobak’s correspondence with [Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service] Rosstat. That was the only time the agency gave a clear reason for its actions. All the other recent cases where data was taken offline were attributed either to technical glitches or to changes in documentation procedures — which sounded like childish excuses — or not explained at all.

In effect, we’ve lost everything that used to be published on a monthly basis — except for two indicators: the total fertility rate and the fertility rate for third and subsequent children, both reported by region over a rolling 12-month period. That’s all that remains, apparently because these are KPI metrics for regional governors. But since there’s now no way to verify these figures, in my view, the risk of data manipulation has increased.

— So civil registry offices have also stopped publishing demographic data too?

— Yes. Regional main civil registry offices have either closed access to the tables on civil status registrations they used to publish, deleted them, stopped updating them, or removed the webpages where the data was posted.

Until recently, many [of these] offices published statistics on registered births and deaths, as well as marriages and divorces. Some even included figures on name changes, adoptions, and paternity acknowledgments. But now, everything that regional main civil registry offices typically published has vanished. And it happened remarkably quickly: from mid-May to mid-June, virtually everything was restricted.

— What do you think might have prompted such a drastic move?

— It all started when Rosstat failed to publish the usual regional [demographic] breakdown for March 2025. Instead, they released only the national total — rounded to the nearest hundred and presented as a cumulative figure from the beginning of the year. And the data from March was published in May, meaning it was delayed.

Meanwhile, even before Rosstat released these “abbreviated” figures, we saw a significant rise in deaths in April based on civil registry data — up to 40 percent in some regions, with a national average of around 15 percent. This spike was linked to a flu and acute respiratory infection epidemic that, hit in the spring rather than the winter this year. If you look at the statistics from the Smorodintsev Research Institute of Influenza in St. Petersburg, there really is a clear surge in cases in March — and a fairly sharp one at that. A spike in infections in March naturally leads to a rise in deaths in March and April, which is exactly what we saw. That, in itself, could explain everything.

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— Aside from making it harder to track the consequences of the war, what is the impact of this data being restricted?

— First, it’s important to remember that this data is used for per capita funding — to calculate benefits, payouts, and budget allocations for schools, kindergartens, and the number of spots in them. It’s used for urban planning, transportation, gas infrastructure. For a huge number of these types of things.

But most importantly, demographic statistics are the foundation of demographic policy. Take the foolish decision [in 2020] to shift maternity capital payments from the second child to the first. Demographers predicted from the start that it wouldn’t work as an incentive — and thanks to the data, we now know the outcome was even worse than expected. But if that policy had been introduced today, we’d have no way of knowing the results — whether it worked at all, or in what way.

Take the governor of Vologda, [Georgy] Filimonov. He claims to be pursuing an anti-alcohol policy and introducing certain rules for alcohol sales, so now, let’s say, you can only buy alcohol between noon and 2:00 p.m. on weekdays. But in reality, we know people drink themselves to death mostly on weekends — and on weekends, nothing has changed. Even putting that aside, you’d still expect some immediate drop in mortality from those restrictions, though not as much as if weekends were included. But now we’ll never know by how much, which means we’ll never know how effective Governor Filimonov’s policy really is. He can now claim whatever he wants, and there’s no way to verify it.

Or take the Nizhny Novgorod region. They have a great birth rate incentive program, the smartest of all the regions. It was announced in late December, with starting from July 1. By October or November, we should start seeing results — possibly even impressive ones. But now we’ll never know.

I’m afraid we likely won’t even get the annual Russian Statistical Yearbook on natural population change this year. And apart from those few indicators, no other statistics will be published on the portal anymore.

We’ve seen this all before. The Soviet Union tried to hide demographic data the same way in the 1970s, when life expectancy was falling in the USSR and rising in capitalist countries. To conceal the problem, they simply restricted the statistics. A more recent example is Belarus, which stopped publishing statistics in 2020 and only just resumed releasing the most basic figures this year, which are practically useless for specialists.

— What’s the most important thing to understand about what’s happening with birth rates in Russia right now?

— With the birth rate, [Russia] is still undergoing the . The average age of first-time motherhood is gradually increasing, the birth rate for first children continues to decline, and the birth rate for second children, after a drop, now appears to be slowly leveling off. This year, for the first time, we’re seeing a decline in third births as well, even according to official data on birth rates for third and subsequent children published on the UIISS website. That drop is likely the delayed effect of the fall in second births in 2022, which, in turn, stemmed from the 2020 decision to transfer maternity capital benefits to firstborns. It’s a domino effect.

But overall, large families have become so common in Russia — with rates among the highest of any developed historically Christian country, especially when it comes to fourth children. This acts as a cushion, keeping the fertility rate around 1.4, give or take. That’s higher than in most of Europe and above the average for developed countries. According to some preliminary estimates, since 2022, Russia has climbed 11 spots in global birth-rate rankings, but only because birth rates have fallen even more steeply in many Western countries and beyond. In other words, Russia hasn’t surged ahead of European countries in the past three years — they’ve slipped below Russia.

All in all, the birth rate in Russia isn’t as dire as some would suggest. If we look at the total number of births there’s a drop due to the small number of women of childbearing age. But when I talk about “birth rate,” I mean the number of children per woman. And on that front, things aren’t actually all that bad. Yes, it’s been declining — but slowly. It’s this, along with high rates of larger families, that’s been holding us up. Large-family rates in Russia are quite high, even if they’ve now started to dip a little.

[Russia] mirrors global trends when it comes to the decline in the birth rate for firstborns. But our birth rate for second children is below the global average — that’s where the biggest problem lies. And that’s because the maternity capital benefit was shifted to the first child five years ago.

We’re also seeing the gradual “aging” of motherhood that typically comes with the second demographic transition, but here it’s happening slowly and started later than in many other countries. According to various sources, it began sometime around 1990 or 1995 and has progressed slowly, especially after 2000. And in [Russia], the second demographic transition has been marked not only by an increase in childlessness, but also in a sharp rise in large families — in fact, a two- to threefold rise. That’s largely due to maternity capital, and possibly a rise in religiosity, followed by social contagion.

Experts know what needs to be done to raise birth rates in Russia. And Russia actually has seen some real success in that area. Over the past quarter-century, few countries can boast the kind of growth in birth rates that Russia saw from 2006 to 2015, when the introduction of the maternity capital program had a highly stimulative effect. The fertility rate jumped 38 percent, from 1.28 to 1.76 children per woman. The problem is, even the most obvious things are not at all obvious to those making the decisions.

— What’s the most important thing to understand about mortality in Russia?

— It’s better to use the concept of “life expectancy” here — it’s a single indicator that reflects mortality while accounting for the population structure. The absolute number of deaths can be misleading, since it depends on the distribution of age cohorts, which makes it impossible to compare “young” countries with “older” ones — say, Russia and Nigeria. But life expectancy allows us to compare any countries or any periods in a given country’s history.

Broadly speaking, here’s what the picture looks like. Starting in the 1960s, life expectancy in all socialist countries in Europe has declined or, at best, stagnated — which basically means that mortality either rose or failed to fall. The eastern regions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic always had the worst numbers, with higher mortality. From 1964 to 1980, life expectancy in the USSR fell by 2.5 years. This was unprecedented: if you exclude wartime, there was nowhere else in the world at that time where life expectancy dropped so dramatically. It was a crisis of the Soviet socialist model of public health and society — and it was especially devastating for men.

Then [Mikhail] Gorbachev came to power [in the USSR] and abruptly — though temporarily — improved the situation with his . Mortality rates dropped immediately. In the campaign’s first full year, the country saw between 200,000 and 270,000 fewer deaths than expected, depending on how you count. Over five years, about a million fewer people died than could have been expected. Life expectancy jumped by 2.5 years across the entire population, and by 3.5 years for men. The birth rate also rose by eight percent nine months later.

Then came [Boris] Yeltsin, the anti-alcohol campaign ended, the socialist bloc fell apart, and the market was flooded with cheap [alcohol] on top of a breakdown of social services, rising crime, unemployment, and poverty. As a result, male life expectancy was at catastrophic levels. In 1994, it was just 58 years for men. Researchers have shown that about 10 to 15 percent of middle-aged Russian men are heavy drinkers, and this group accounts for up to half of all mortality. Depending on alcohol policy, this population either expands or shrinks — and more or fewer of them die. It’s like a tumor: when vodka is cheap, it grows and absorbs people; when it’s expensive, it shrinks, and mortality drops.

After that, we saw some fluctuations. Between 1995 and 1998, life expectancy started to recover, but it never reached the levels of 1991 or even 1992. Then came the [1998 financial crisis], which was followed by another [increase in mortality] starting in 1999. From 2002 to 2005, we were at the bottom.

In 2006, Russia began rolling out UFAIS — the Unified State Automated Information System for tracking the production and sale of ethanol and alcoholic beverages. In the first year of implementation, technical and logistical problems led to major shortages of legal alcohol on store shelves — and that year, 170,000 fewer people died than expected. Male life expectancy jumped by more than a full year.

From 2006 until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we experienced arguably the best period in Russian history for increasing life expectancy and reducing mortality — steady, fast, and robust. For men, life expectancy rose from about 59 to 68 years — an increase of nine years in just 13. Truly remarkable. There were a few brief interruptions: the , [the war in] Donbas. But those were barely noticeable. Otherwise, it was all upward progress.

Then came COVID, which we handled terribly. Or rather, we didn’t handle it at all. Russia ended up among the top 10 countries in the world for excess mortality. And before the pandemic had even ended, the [full-scale] war began in 2022. Over the past year and a half, the situation has clearly worsened — though now we’ll never learn about it. As a result, the highest life expectancy achieved for Russian men was around 68 years, but I suspect it’s already dropped to 66.

— What will researchers do without official demographic statistics? Are you hoping for any new proxy data that could be used to reconstruct the missing information?

— There are different kinds of researchers. Some work at state universities and hold senior positions, and they’ll be given the same data — only now under a “for official use only” label. And if any of that data leaks, they’ll be punished, and they won’t be able to publish it anywhere. This will further limit collaboration with foreign colleagues.

So, what we’re left with is a situation where the people who do have access to the data will get it in secret, write secret reports about it, and send them off to secret people in a secret government. Only now, the people making decisions will have even less reason to listen to these secret experts, because those experts won’t even have a voice. And what comes of those consultations, I don’t know. If the authorities weren’t listening to reason before, why would they suddenly start now?