Russian Census of 2002 (Russian: Всеросси́йская пе́репись населе́ния 2002 го́да) was the first census of the Russian Federation carried out on October 9 through October 16, 2002. It was carried out by the Russian Federal Service of State Statistics (Rosstat).

Data collection[link]

The census data were collected as of midnight October 9, 2002.

Resident population[link]

The census was primarily intended to collect statistical information about the resident population of Russian Federation. The resident population included:

• Russian citizens living in Russia (including those temporary away from the country, provided the absence from the country was expected to last less than one year);
• non-citizens (i.e. foreign citizens and stateless persons) who were any of the following:
  • legal permanent residents;
  • persons who have arrived to the country with the intent to settle permanently or to seek asylum, regardless of whether they have actually obtained the appropriate immigration status;
  • authorized foreign workers or students, provided the period of temporary residence in Russia was expected to last at least one year.

All detailed census tables are for the resident population.

All (resident) participants were asked question on their gender, birth date, marital status, household composition, bithplace, citizenship, ethnic or tribal self-identification (национальность), education level, language competence, sources of income, and employment status. A sample of the participants were also asked more detailed questions about their economic and housing situation.

Non-residents[link]

In additional to the resident population, the census also counted two more groups of people:

• Russian citizens currently living abroad for more than one year in connection with the employment with the federal government.
• Persons (regardles of their citizenship) permanently residing abroad, but temporarily present in Russia (as tourists, short-term foreign workers or students, etc).

Foreign citizens present in Russia as employees of foreign diplomatic missions or international organizations, and members of their household, were excluded from the census altogether.

Census results[link]

The Census recorded the resident population of 145,166,731 persons, including 67,605,133 men and 77,561,598 women. That included urban population of 106,429,000 (73%) and rural population of 38,738,000 (27%).

The non-resident populations included:

• Russian citizens living abroad in connection with the federal government service: 107,288 (67,058 men and 40,230 women);
• Foreign residents present in Russia on the census date: 239,018 (177,465 men and 61,553 women).

Citizenship[link]

Census participants were asked what country (or countries) they were citizens of. 142,442,000 respondents reported being Russian citizens; among them, 44,000 also had citizenship of another country.

Among Russia's resident population, 1,025,413 foreign citizens and 429,881 stateless persons were counted. [1]

1,269,023 persons did not report their citizenship.

Language abilities[link]

Among the questions asked were "Are you competent in the Russian language?" (Владеете ли Вы русским языком?) and "What other languages are you competent in?" (Какими иными языками Вы владеете?). As the census manual explained, "competence" (владение) meant either the ability to speak, read and write a language, or only the ability to speak it. The questions did not distinguish native and non-native speakers, nor did they try to measure the degree of language competence. For small children, presumably, the recorded answer was based on the language(s) spoken by the parents.

142.6 million (98.3%) of the responders claimed competence in Russian. Other widely reported languages (more than 500,000 speakers each) are listed in the table below.

1.42 million responders did not provide language information.

For a more detailed list, see List of languages of Russia.

See also[link]

• Demographics of Russia (includes ethnic composition and some other census results)
• Russian Empire Census
• Soviet Census

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Russian Census 2002

• Official census home page
• (Russian) Population of Chechnya: was the Census correct?

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Demographics of Russia
Population (in millions) 1950 – January 2012.[1]
Population:	143,100,000 (Official Estimate - April 2012)[2]
Growth rate:	0.15% (2011)
Birth rate:	12.6 births/1,000 population (2011)
Death rate:	13.5 deaths/1,000 population (2011)
Life expectancy:	70.3 years (2011)
–male:	64.3 years
–female:	76.1 years
Fertility rate:	1.61 children born/woman (2011)
Infant mortality rate:	7.2 deaths/1,000 live births (2011)
Net migration rate:	2.24 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2011)
Age structure:
0-14 years:	14.9%
15-64 years:	71.8%
65-over:	13.3% (2009)
Sex ratio:
Total:	0.86 male(s)/female (2009)
At birth:	1.05 male(s)/female
Under 15:	1.05 male(s)/female (male 10,806,895/female 10,285,532)
15-64 years:	0.92 male(s)/female (male 48,864,763/female 53,048,315)
65-over:	0.46 male(s)/female (male 5,969,976/female 12,928,498)
Nationality:
Nationality:	noun: Russian(s) adjective: Russian
Major ethnic:	Russians
Language:
Spoken:	Russian, others

The demographics of Russia is about the demographic features of the population of the Russian Federation, including population growth, population density, ethnic composition, education level, health, economic status, and other aspects of the population.

The population of Russia was 143,100,000 as per the official estimate for April 1, 2012.^[3] The population hit a historic peak at 148,689,000 in 1991, just before the breakup of the Soviet Union, but then began a decade-long decline, falling at a rate of about 0.5% per year due to declining birth rates, rising death rates and emigration. However, the decline began to slow considerably in recent years, and in 2009 Russia recorded annual population growth for the first time in 15 years, with growth of 23,300.^[4][5]

In 2011, the population of Russia grew by 160,000 people,^[6] and reached a total of more than 143 million.

In the first 3 months of 2012, the population increased by 31,000 people. ^[7]

According to the 2010 census, ethnic Russians make up 81% of the total population,^[8][9] while six other ethnicities have a population exceeding 1 million – Tatars (3.9%), Ukrainians (1.4%), Bashkir (1.1%), Chuvash (1%), Chechens (1%) and Armenians (0.9%). In total, 160 different ethnic groups and indigenous peoples live within the Russian federation's borders.

It is important to note that in the 2010 Census, almost 6 million people (about 4% of the overall population.) did not declare any ethnic origin, compared to about 1 million in the 2002 Census. This is due to the fact that those people were counted from administrative databases and not directly, and were therefore unable to state their ethnicity.^[8][9][10] Therefore, the percentages mentioned above are taken from the total population that declared their ethnicity, given that the non-declared remainder is thought to have an ethnic composition similar to the declared segment.^[11]

Russia's population density is 8.4 people per square kilometre (22 per square mile), making it one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. The population is most dense in the European part of the country, centering around Moscow and Saint Petersburg. 74% of the population is urban.

Main trends[link]

Natural population growth of Russia since 1950.^[4][12][13]

  Birth rate

  Death rate

  Natural growth rate

Natural population growth rates (per 1,000 population) by region in 2009.

The population of Russia peaked at 148,689,000 in 1991, just before the breakup of the Soviet Union. Low birth rates and abnormally high death rates caused Russia's population to decline at a 0.5% annual rate, or about 750,000 to 800,000 people per year from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s. The UN warned in 2005 that Russia's then population of about 143 million could fall by a third by 2050 if trends did not improve.^[14][15] However, the Russian state statistics service Rosstat had more optimistic forecasts in 2009, whose Medium variant predicted that Russia's population would only fall to 139 million by 2030^[16] (Low: 127 million; High: 147 million). Furthermore, in 2008 one demographic analyst (correctly) predicted a resumption in population growth by 2010.^[17]

The number of Russians living in poverty has halved since the economic crisis following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the improving economy had a positive impact on the country's low birth rate. The birth rate of Russia rose from its lowest point of 8.27 births per 1000 people in 1999 to 12.6 per 1000 in 2010. Likewise, the fertility rate rose from its lowest point of 1.16 in 1999 to 1.54 in 2009. 2007 marked the highest growth in birth rates that the country had seen in 25 years, and 2009 marked the highest total birth rate since 1991.^[18] For comparison, the United States^[19] birth rate in 2009 was 13.8 per 1000 . While the Russian birth rate is comparable to that of other developed countries, its death rate is much higher, especially among working-age males due to a comparatively high rate of fatalities caused by heart disease and other external causes such as accidents. The Russian death rate in 2010 was 14.3 per 1000 citizens. For comparison, the US^[19] death rate in 2009 was 8.4 per 1000 .

The causes for this sharp increase in mortality are widely debated, with some academics citing alcohol abuse as the main culprit,^[20] and others citing the drastic and widely negative changes in lifestyle caused by economic reforms that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. According to a 2009 report by The Lancet,^[21] a British medical journal, mass privatization, an element of the economic-reform package nicknamed shock therapy, clearly correlates with higher mortality rates. The report argues that the advocates of the economic reforms ignored the human cost of the policies they were promoting, such as unemployment and human suffering, leading to an early death. These conclusions were criticized by The Economist.^[22] According to the Russian demographic publication Demoscope,^[23] the rising male death rate was a long-term trend from 1960 to 2005. The only significant reversion of the trend was caused by Mikhail Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign, but its effect was only temporary. According to the publication, the sharp rise of death rates in the early 1990s was caused by the exhaustion of the effect of the anti-alcohol campaign, while the market reforms were of only secondary importance. The authors also claimed the Lancet's study is flawed because it used 1985 death rate as the base, while that was in fact the very maximum of the effect of the anti-alcohol campaign.^[23]

Government measures to halt the demographic crisis was a key subject of Vladimir Putin's 2006 state of the nation address.^[24] As a result, a national programme was developed with the goal to reverse the trend by 2020. Soon after, a study published in 2007 showed that the rate of population decrease had begun to slow: if the net decrease in January–August 2006 was 408,200 people, it was 196,600 in the same period in 2007. The death rate accounted for 357,000 of these, which is 137,000 less than in 2006. At the same time period in 2007, there were just over 1 million births in Russia (981,600 in 2006), whilst deaths decreased from 1,475,000 to 1,402,300. In all, the number of deaths exceeded the number of births by 1.3 times, down from 1.5 in 2006. Eighteen of the 83 provinces showed a natural growth of population (in 2006: 16). The Russian Ministry of Economic Development expressed hope that by 2020 the population would stabilize at 138–139 million, and by 2025, to increase again to its present day status of 143–145, also raising the life expectancy to 75 years.^[25]

The natural population decline continued to slow through 2008—2010 due to declining death rates and increasing birth rates, and in 2009 the population saw yearly growth for the first time in 15 years.^[4][5] In September 2009, the Ministry of Health and Social Development reported that Russia recorded natural population growth for the first time in 15 years, with 1,000 more births than deaths in August.^[26] In April 2011 the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin pledged to spend the 1.5 trillion rubles (£32.5 billion or $54 billion) on various measures to boost Russia's declining birthrate by 30 per cent in the next four years.^[27]

Population statistics[link]

Population pyramid of Russia as of 1 January 2010. "Waves" are caused by huge losses in the WWII.

Population density[link]

8.4 people per square kilometer (2010 Russian Census)^[28]

Population distribution[link]

74% urban, 26% rural (2010 Russian Census)