Population of Tsarist Russia

Jiraiyathegallant

So, the Russian Empire had 120 million people in 1897 and around 180 million in 1916 (Wikipedia is my citation). Given the rapid population growth Russia had, and how Socially Conservative Russia was, what would be realistic population figures?

If they maintain 50% growth every twenty years until the 60s (which is when Mexico, Brazil, and many other countries collapsed) they could have a population of 400 million by the late fifties. Then following a gradual reduction down to around the replacement rate by the present they could have a billion people.

Of course, a huge number of these people aren't really Russian even with large amounts of Russification and could succeed. Or if Russia develops early they might end up more like the United States as a rich conservative country with lots of land and stubbornly high birthrates, but nothing too high.

So, is a billion people unrealistic?
 
anotherlurker

anotherlurker

RandomWriterGuy said:
Considering the harsh climate and lack of good farming soil one billion no no. 350 million is a better bet.
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it has ukraine and poland, the best farmland in europe by far, if they develop towards industrialized, market driven agriculture (like everyone else who didnt collapse into civil war, anarchy or communism) they should support a far far larger population. considering how the soviet union had nearly 300 million people in 1990...yeah, they had to import food but that was due to the usual communist economic clusterfuck. the russian economy doesnt have to run at german efficiency, spanish efficiency is more than enough, the population ceiling is far higher than 350 million.

also some of their neighbors have good farmland. and russia has lots of big sticks.

some data on how shitty soviet agriculture is:
Hedrick Smith wrote in The Russians (1976) that, according to Soviet statistics, one fourth of the value of agricultural production in 1973 was produced on the private plots peasants were allowed (2% of the whole arable land).[18] In the 1980s, 3% of the land was in private plots which produced more than a quarter of the total agricultural output.[19] i.e. private plots produced somewhere around 1600% and 1100% as much as common ownership plots in 1973 and 1980. Soviet figures claimed that the Soviets produced 20–25% as much as the U.S. per farmer in the 1980s
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Lalli

It depends how surviving Russian Empire would develope and what kind of history it has, but I don't see billion being realistic. Without Stalin and WW2 or lesser devastating Stalin population would be higher as population of OTL Russia + these areas which were part of RE. I guess that 350 - 400 million is pretty near. Perhaps even 500 million but note more.
 

Viriato

I did some calculations based on a Russia without the population shocks of the wars, Stalinism or Communism. Keep in mind that before World War I, Russia had a far higher birthrate than countries in the west, its demographic trends were most comparable to those of Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, below is a comparison of births per 1,000 in 1914.

1914
Russia 44
Italy 32.4
Austria 31.3
Germany 28.3
Australia 27.5
USA 27.2
Denmark 25.6
Norway 25.4
UK 24.3
Belgium 22.9
France 19.0

A better comparison is the 1906-1910 average

Russia 45.4
Bulgaria 42.1
Romania 40.3
Hungary 36.7
Austria 33.6
Spain 33.6
Italy 32.4
Germany 31.7
Finland 31.0
Netherlands 29.6
Denmark 28.2
Netherlands 29.6
Scotland 27.6
Australia 26.7
New Zealand 26.6
Norway 26.3
England & Wales 26.2
Switzerland 26.0
Belgium 24.7
Ireland 23.4
France 19.9

Russia did have a higher mortality rate, however its rate of annual average increase was still higher than countries with net immigration (New Zealand, Australia, Germany).

NATURAL INCREASE PER YEAR RATE 1906-1910
Bulgaria 1.8%
New Zealand 1.7%
Russia 1.7%
Australia 1.6%
Denmark 1.5%
Netherlands 1.5%
Finland 1.4%
Germany 1.4%
Romania 1.4%
Serbia 1.4%
Norway 1.3%
England & Wales 1.2%
Hungary 1.2%
Scotland 1.2%
Austria 1.1%
Italy 1.1%
Sweden 1.1%
Switzerland 1.0%
Belgium 0.9%
Spain 0.9%
Ireland 0.6%
France 0.1%

According to the 1897 census the Russian Empire had 125.6 million people, by 1916 that figure had risen to 181.5 million.

If Russia's population had continued growing at a normal pace, following the trajectory of the Balkans, the population would have reached 255 million by 1950 and 300 million by 1975. That is based on the natural growth rates found in Poland and the Balkans at the time. If the country undergoes a rapid decline in birthrates just as most of Europe beginning in the the late 1960s, growth would slow down and eventually be negative by 2015, however this would only begin within the last few years. The population would still be 355 million in 2015, making it larger than the USA.

On the other hand, we have to consider that before the war, Russia had a very high total fertility rate, that was among the highest in Europe. It also had high levels of illiteracy and infant mortality (The Grand Duchy of Finland was the exception to this). However, its rates were not dissimilar to those of Serbia, Bulgaria or Romania at the time. The Soviet Union caused a great social upheaval with and if Russia without the wars remains religious and more socially conservative for longer it is possible to have a population of 455 million by 2014.

Before 1914, overseas emigration from was increasing, but nearly half of this emigration was Jewish. Due to the pogroms, Jews increasingly opted to quit the country, overwhelmingly choosing New York City as their destination. However, smaller numbers moved to other US Cities, Argentina, Canada, the UK, France, Germany. Very small numbers to Palestine in Ottoman Turkey too. Despite this large migratory movement, the birthrate of the Jews in the Russian Empire was so high that their population rose from 5.2 million in 1897 to around 6.9 million in 1913. Not surprising in the majority were Orthodox Jews, living in insular communities of the Pale Settlement. The c Soviet Union secularized and assimilated the Jewish community to a large extent causing them to adopt Russian as their language rather than Yiddish and causing birthrates to decline.

The second largest group emigrating from the Russian Empire were the Poles. Poles accounted for just over 1/4th of all emigration from Russian Empire during the pre-war period. They emigrated primarily to the USA, and in smaller numbers to Canada, South America and Eastern Germany (mostly as seasonal farm workers to the latter). Lithuanians were around 10% of all emigrants, Finns constituted another 10%, and ethnic Germans 5% of all emigrants from the Empire. The ethnic Germans like Jews were overwhelmingly permanent emigrants who left the country in family groups, whereas around the majority Poles, Lithuanians and Finns were single males, and nearly 1/3rd of these returned after a sojourn in the US, Canada or Argentina. Ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians accounted for less than 5% of all overseas emigrants from the empire. The vast majority of Ukrainian emigrants from Europe during this period were from Austria rather than Russia.

Rather than move overseas, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians moved eastwards, to Siberia and even Manchuria. These groups were migrating in droves to Siberia after the 1880s with the population there growing from 4.3 million in 1885 to 12.8 million in 1915. The Trans-Siberian Railway especially spurring emigration to the Russian Far East. Migration to the East increased after the completion of the railway and between 1906-1913 some 3.44 million settlers moved to Siberia, cities like Vladivostok doubled in population between 1910 and 1915. American contemporaries compared Siberia to the American and Canadian West.
 

ObssesedNuker

Out of curiosity: what happens if you just cut-out the negative impact of Stalinism and WW2, thereby having the mid to late 1920s birthrates continue on before entering into a natural decline?
 

takerma

Banned
Half a billion is easily supportable without communist agriculture. As anotherlurker said the degree to which soviet system was screwed is really hard to overstate. Land and climate in Ukraine is ridiculuosly good for agriculture. Even with half a billion the Empire will be exporting massive amounts of food.
 

NolanFoster

More important than loss of population in the 30s and 40s is the decline in birth rates due to a whole array of reasons. Namely that poor, illiterate peasant populations grow a lot faster than literate urban ones, and the Soviet era was a time of intense urbanization. Also, the influence of orthodox Christianity was weakened. The average ages of marriage and childbearing increased. One thing that was not a factor was an inability of Soviet agriculture to support a larger population.

In 1990, the Soviet population was 290,938,469. It could have been some 20,000,000-100,000,000 larger, in theory. But you could just as easily argue that the U.S. population should be over 400,000,000 today without the carnage of the civil war, or that western populations should have rivaled Asian ones were it not for X plague, or that I should be 15 feet tall based on my growth at 7 years old. It's impossible to verify and ignores all limiting factors.
 

Mitchell Hundred

NolanFoster said:
More important than loss of population in the 30s and 40s is the decline in birth rates due to a whole array of reasons. Namely that poor, illiterate peasant populations grow a lot faster than literate urban ones, and the Soviet era was a time of intense urbanization. Also, the influence of orthodox Christianity was weakened. The average ages of marriage and childbearing increased. One thing that was not a factor was an inability of Soviet agriculture to support a larger population.

In 1990, the Soviet population was 290,938,469. It could have been some 20,000,000-100,000,000 larger, in theory. But you could just as easily argue that the U.S. population should be over 400,000,000 today without the carnage of the civil war, or that western populations should have rivaled Asian ones were it not for X plague, or that I should be 15 feet tall based on my growth at 7 years old. It's impossible to verify and ignores all limiting factors.
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I doubt that is a factual argument that could be had.

I'm no expert in demographic trends but would the 600,000-700,000 lives lost during the Civil War in any way have contributed to an extra 100,000,000 million people today? sounds far fetched.
 

Viriato

During World War I, Russia lost between 2.8 to 3.4 million people, couple that with the Russian Civil War and Pre-Stalinist Purges and famines adding another 9 million. Stalin was responsible for the death of another 20 million and in World War II another 27 million were killed. That alone gives a total of 59million unnecessary deaths.
 

Viriato

Mitchell Hundred said:
I doubt that is a factual argument that could be had.

I'm no expert in demographic trends but would the 600,000-700,000 lives lost during the Civil War in any way have contributed to an extra 100,000,000 million people today? sounds far fetched.
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Using the Civil War deaths, military and civilian that would add a maximum of 7.7 million people to the U.S. population in 2015.
 

Dr. No

I love how some people here follow some kind of demographic determinism.

I found it especially egregious when President Kaczynski bantered how Poland would have had 66 million people today if it weren't for World War II and that it therefore deserved more of a say in the European Union. That he was nuts is another question, but his argumentation pre-supposed that he also took the baby boom in the aftermath of World War II for granted which it isn't, let alone that Poland would still exist in its 1939 borders with all its minorities.

The baby boom IOTL was actually the bigger the more the land had been cleared of its former inhabitants, as DER SPIEGEL wrote back in 1961. If you think about it, China has its more than a billion people because it overcompensated its losses from escalations like the Taiping Rebellion and the Great Leap Forward. That's why China in Max Sinister's Chaos TL is supposed to have 800 million people and not more, because of a more gradual development.

Back to topic, I think that a million additional people every year as in the late Soviet Union is the best thing that any Russian state can hope for.
 
anotherlurker

anotherlurker

Dr. Nodelescu said:
I love how some people here follow some kind of demographic determinism.

I found it especially egregious when President Kaczynski bantered how Poland would have had 66 million people today if it weren't for World War II and that it therefore deserved more of a say in the European Union. That he was nuts is another question, but his argumentation pre-supposed that he also took the baby boom in the aftermath of World War II for granted which it isn't, let alone that Poland would still exist in its 1939 borders with all its minorities.

The baby boom IOTL was actually the bigger the more the land had been cleared of its former inhabitants, as DER SPIEGEL wrote back in 1961. If you think about it, China has its more than a billion people because it overcompensated its losses from escalations like the Taiping Rebellion and the Great Leap Forward. That's why China in Max Sinister's Chaos TL is supposed to have 800 million people and not more, because of a more gradual development.

Back to topic, I think that a million additional people every year as in the late Soviet Union is the best thing that any Russian state can hope for.
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at that time the soviet union was already deep into economic chaos, since the 70s really... when economy runs bad people get less children due to uncertainity about the future and because they cant afford it. also, the communists were heavily pushing female equality and access to aborition which puts a big dent into birth rates - can you see any kind of "russian empire" doing this? i cant.

is it really "demographic determinism" if it happens globally? japan went from 45 million at the start of the war to nearly 130 million today, the usa went from 120 million to nearly 330 today, china from 400 million to 1,4 billion. why would russia be the only one to break the global trend?
 

Dr. No

anotherlurker said:
at that time the soviet union was already deep into economic chaos, since the 70s really... when economy runs bad people get less children due to uncertainity about the future and because they cant afford it. also, the communists were heavily pushing female equality and access to aborition which puts a big dent into birth rates - can you see any kind of "russian empire" doing this? i cant.

is it really "demographic determinism" if it happens globally? japan went from 45 million at the start of the war to nearly 130 million today, the usa went from 120 million to nearly 330 today, china from 400 million to 1,4 billion. why would russia be the only one to break the global trend?
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China overcompensated former losses, the USA benefits from immigration and accompanied higher birth rates, Japan definitely had more than 45 million people even back then, at least as many as the Germans. If the Russians had avoided the Red October and the Great Patriotic War, it would have become some first-world nation whose first generation growing up affluent would've had less children than their parents, ending the hike to a stable high.
 

Kevin C. Smith

If anyone wants to get all Malthusian about this, what would the capacity of a surviving Tsarist Russia be based on the food production of its arable land? Assuming that all of it was developed sustainably (no Caspian Sea fiascoes) and we provide a food supply/diet comparable to the norm in Western Europe (i.e., plenty of consumer variety but not US levels of waste and processed crap).

Many, many years ago, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculation of potential population limits based on the number of people per acre of arable land. Using China as the baseline and assuming it population at one billion people, the US was around 1-1.2 billion, I think (Canada came in at 700-800 million, IIRC). I don't recall-but I would guess-that Russia (w/OTL Poland) would be right up there as well.

Of course, this leaves out just about every other variable of resource and trade.
 

HunterX

Kevin C. Smith said:
If anyone wants to get all Malthusian about this, what would the capacity of a surviving Tsarist Russia be based on the food production of its arable land? Assuming that all of it was developed sustainably (no Caspian Sea fiascoes) and we provide a food supply/diet comparable to the norm in Western Europe (i.e., plenty of consumer variety but not US levels of waste and processed crap).

Many, many years ago, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculation of potential population limits based on the number of people per acre of arable land. Using China as the baseline and assuming it population at one billion people, the US was around 1-1.2 billion, I think (Canada came in at 700-800 million, IIRC). I don't recall-but I would guess-that Russia (w/OTL Poland) would be right up there as well.

Of course, this leaves out just about every other variable of resource and trade.
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800 million people in Canada doesn't sound remotely plausible.
 
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