Russia’s demographic trends portend a crisis of alarming proportions for the country’s future human and social capital, as explicated in grave detail in the National Bureau of Asian Research report Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis: Dimensions, Causes, Implications (May 2010) by Nicholas Eberstadt.
Describing Russia’s depopulation trend as “nothing short of a humanitarian catastrophe,” Eberstadt paints a compellingly grim picture of Russia’s future demographic profile, which has serious implications for the country’s domestic policy priorities as well as for the country’s ambitions to regain a preeminent position on the world geopolitical stage. Indeed, Eberstadt’s report leads one to question the very viability of Russia as a resurgent power of the twenty-first-century.
