The Russian census says that the population of Russia is 142,857,000 people, with an average age of 39 years. Official information of the Russian Statistical Agency on results of the All-Russian Census of 2010 was published by the Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
Russia dropped in the rating of the world’s most populated states from the 7th position (according to census in 2002) to the 8th. The most populated states are China, India, USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan and now Bangladesh. Even compared with data published in March 2011, the population dropped by 48,000.
Population reduction is speeding up. The last Soviet census in 1989 and the census in 2002 show that the state lost 1.8 million people in 13 years. But in the last 8 years the country’ population dropped by 2.3 million. 8,500 villages have died out since 2002.
Part of villages joined cities and changed their status. But some villages became deserted with the population moving out to cities or dying. Census takers say there are over 19,400 deserted villages still registered, exceeding the previous census’ figures by 48%.
The ratio of men to women has not changed much, but the share of women still grows. There are 10.7 million more women than men. The population gets older too. The average age is 39 years, compared with 37.7 in 2002.
The image of a family changes as well. There were 33 million couples in 2010 (34 million in 2002). 13% of them have not been registered (9.7% in 2002). The number of divorcements increased. There are fewer young couples. There had been 3,700 people in couples aged under 16 in 2002, the figure has dropped twofold since then.
The number of people who do not want to identify their nationality increased from about 1.5 million in 2002 (1%) to 5.6 million (3.7%). 80.90% of people called themselves Russians in 2010, 80.64% in 2002. The second largest nationality is the tatars (3.87%). The number of Ukrainians dropped from 2.05% to 1.41%. Chechens, Avarians and Armenians grew.
