Is it true that there are actually less than 90 million people living in Russia?

According to numerous publications on the Russian-language Internet, the Russian authorities are hiding the real number of citizens of the country - in fact, there are about 89 million of them. We checked whether the authors of such materials are right.

The first texts stating that Russia’s population is more than a third lower than official data began to appear shortly after the 2010 population census. According to its results in the country resided about 143 million people. Citizens who doubted these data began to spread message that the census results are falsified and in reality there are less than 90 million people living in the country. In March 2011, the contents of this message used in his criticism of the authorities, State Duma deputy from the A Just Russia party Alexander Burkov. The same text was quoted almost unchanged by Internet users in 2016, and in 2018, and in 2020 year.

The source material, which contained the “truth” about the population of Russia, was a message from a certain Ekaterina Ulitina. Most often she was quoted as follows: “I work in the central analytical center of Russia in the department (registry office). As of June 1, 2010, according to documents, the living population in Russia was 89,654,325 people, and not 142,000,000, as stated in the population census. In 2009, 5,000,854 people died. In the period from January 1, 2010 to June 1, 2010, 4,678,856 people died. Every quarter the government records our reports, but the real figures released are completely different. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next census shows population growth. 60% of the Russian population has an average retirement age of 67 years. Within 10–15 years, the mortality rate is expected to be about 40,000,000 people.” (author's spelling and punctuation preserved).

Can the information provided by Ulitina be at all reliable? First, let's find out whether she really is a specialist in demography or statistics. Search queries for “Ekaterina Ulitina” provide links to someone living in Stockholm architect and St. Petersburg actress, but the vast majority are materials containing the above-cited message about false official statistics. In 2018, the public “Convention of Rights” on VKontakte reported, that after the “real” statistics were made public, the girl was fired, and she was also “politely advised to keep her mouth shut in the future.” The material was not provided with links to sources, and the public itself is difficult to consider credible. Its authors publish on the dangers of vaccination and wearing masks, secret conspiracies, “the laws of the universe and the energy of money,” the differences between “male and female avatars” and much more. We were unable to find references to Ulitina outside the context of the above quote, nor to the central analytical center of Russia in the registry office where she allegedly worked. Apparently, such an institution does not exist at all. Possibly meant Analytical center under the government of the Russian Federation, but on the website of this department no mentions about such an employee.

In some materials, the authors of which used Ulitina’s message, there are attempts to understand where the number 89.6 million people came from. For example, on the website FinNews.ru approved, that this population roughly corresponds to the number of people that Russia can feed based on average annual grain harvests. This methodology is very popular among conspiracy theorists, who have thus calculated: the entire population of the planet amounts to there are about 1.5 billion people, and the world government is deceiving ordinary people to make them easier to control. There is no reason to believe such estimates of the population of Russia and the world. Of course, government statistics agencies cannot be absolutely accurate in matters of demography, but the almost twofold exaggeration is not supported by any serious arguments. In 2020, the population of Russia amounted to 146.8 million people.

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. https://rosstat.gov.ru/folder/12781
2. http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/2020/0883/index.php
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_Order_(conspiracy_theory)#Population_control