Siberia’s population plummets

In the past 10 years, the population of Chukotka has fallen by more than 60 per cent. The neighbouring province of Magadan has lost more than half its inhabitants, and some 15 per cent of residents have left the port city of Murmansk.

Altogether, at least a million people have headed west from the Russian Far East. To save on the cost of supporting communities in northern regions, at least 20 per cent of the population has been evacuated.

Last year, a study of demographic trends by the Russian Academy of Sciences found that Russia’s North and the Far East had turned into “a consolidated zone of lost population.”

Large tracts of central and western Siberia have been losing population as a result of factory shut-downs, collapsed collective farms, the closure of coal, diamond and gold mines, the decline of military industries and the decay of the frontier bases in the former heavily militarized Soviet republic.