[so is the demographic crisis passing?]
CENSUS PRELIMINARY RESULTS: POPULATION OF RUSSIA IS 145 MILLION PEOPLE
MOSCOW, November 15th, 2002. /From a RIA Novosti correspondent/. - Vladimir Zorin, head of the committee on nationalities, told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday that according to the preliminary results of the all Russian census the population of Russia is more than 145 mln. people.
Mr. Zorin pointed out that experts had though it would be 143 mln. people.
----- The census figures are highly approximate, to be sure.
Russia's birth rate has been increasing and death rate decreasing in the recent past, though average male life expectancy is still about 58 (72 for women) and the average couple has about 1.3 children. These figures I think are just for "Russian" Russians, ethnic Russians, not necessarily for citizens of the Russian Federation as a class. Dagestan has a very high birth rate (oddly, since it's the poorest Russian region outside neighboring Chechnya) as does Tatarstan (which is the third-most prosperous region in Russia).
Russia also has a high rate of immigration, mostly illegal, from the other former Soviet republics, Afghanistan and China. 30 percent of the population of Armenia has emigrated in the last decade, mostly to Russia. There are almost as many Georgians in Russia as there are in Georgia now. (And, incidentally, three-quarters of Chechens don't reside in Chechnya. They live elsewhere in Russia.)