International Brief

(Single years of age) Millions 0 1.60 While recent Russian demographic trends reflect the country's current economic and social malaise, they also continue to reveal the shocks experienced by Russia's population earlier in this century. Russia's fertility has been falling sharply since the breakup of the USSR: Russia's 1993 total fertility rate (TFR) of 1.4 ranks among the lowest in Europe. Despite this, access to modern contraceptive methods remains difficult. In 1992 Russia's population passed a demographic milestone, experiencing more deaths than births. Although attention is often given to the increased mortality among adult men, mortality has also risen for women and infants. National averages for Russia as a whole often mask variation in demographic patterns and conditions within Russia's vast territory. Population Growth and Composition Russia's population dynamics over the foreseeable future will be closely connected to the composition of Russia's population, which possesses a highly irregular age-sex structure (figure 1), due to the vicissitudes of history. As of 1996 the effect of World War II is clearly visible in the dent around age 50, reflecting the small number of wartime births relative to the prewar and postwar years. The trough around age 60 corresponds to the famine and disruption occasioned by the forced collectivization of agriculture and the purges of the 1930's. Further down, the depression around age 25 is an echo effect of World War II. The population ages 25-29 in 1996 is largely the children of mothers born during the war and the immediate postwar years, who were and remain less numerous than their counterparts a few years older or younger. Upon reaching childbearing age this small contingent of mothers produced smaller numbers of children than were registered in the preceding and ensuing years. The narrowing at the base of Russia's current age pyramid includes the granddaughters of mothers born in the war years. Russia's age-sex structure leads to sizeable fluctuations in births as the various cohorts pass through the reproductive ages. Much of the recent drop in births in Russia is due to the aging of the relatively large 1950's birth cohorts, which passed out of the prime ages of childbear-ing by 1995. Similarly, the population increases projected for the first