Natural population decrease in Russia down by 21% in Jan 2022 vs Jan 2021, but twice higher than in Jan 2020 - Rosstat

MOSCOW. March 6 (Interfax) - The natural population decrease in Russia (the excess of the number of deaths over the number of births) declined by 21.2% to 89,170 people in January 2022 compared to 113,167 people in January 2021, the Russian Federal Statistics Service (Rosstat) said on Saturday.

At the same time, this figure grew by 97% compared to January 2020, i.e. before the Covid-19 pandemic started gaining momentum, when the natural population decrease was 45,255 people.

The number of births declined by 2.6% to 103,782 in January 2022 from 106,602 in January 2021 and by 12.7% from 118,820 in January 2020.

The number of deaths declined by 12.2% to 192,952 in January 2022 from 219,769 in January 2021, but grew by 17.6% from 164,075 in January 2020.

As reported earlier, the natural population decrease in Russia in 2021 amounted to 1.042 million people, compared to 688,700 people in 2020 and 317,200 people in 2019. The 2021 natural population decrease was the highest over the entire post-Soviet history of Russia (the previous highest natural population decrease of 958,500 people was recorded in 2000).

As a result, according to Rosstat's tentative data, Russia had a population of 145,478,097 people as of January 1, 2022, declining from 146,171,015 people as of January 1, 2021. Russia's population in 2021 declined by 692,918 people (this figure is lower than the natural population decrease due to immigration growth, which partly compensated for it). This was the most dramatic decrease in Russia's population after 2003, when the country's population declined from 145.0 million people as of January 1, 2003 to 144.3 million people as of January 1, 2004.