Demographics of the Soviet Union
According to data from the 1989 Soviet census, the population of the USSR was made up of 70% East Slavs and 17% Turkic peoples, with no other single ethnic group making up more than 2%.
[citation needed] During the Second World War on the Eastern Front, the Soviet Union lost an approximate 26.6 million people.
[2] The crude birth rate in the Soviet Union throughout its history had been decreasing – from 44.0 per thousand in 1926 to 18.0 in 1974, mostly due to urbanization and rising average age of marriages.
According to some Western predictions made in the 1990s, if the Soviet Union had stayed together, it is likely that ethnic Russians would have lost their majority status in the 2000s (decade).
The late 1960s and the 1970s witnessed a dramatic reversal of the path of declining mortality in the Soviet Union, and was especially notable among men in working ages, and also especially in Russia and other predominantly Slavic areas of the country.
[7] Referring to data for the two decades ending in 1989–1990, while noting some abatement in adult mortality rates in the Soviet republics in the 1980s, Ward Kingkade and Eduardo Arriaga characterized this situation as follows: "All the former Soviet countries have followed the universal tendency for mortality to decline as infectious diseases are brought under control while death rates from degenerative diseases rise.
Another distinctive characteristic of the former Soviet case is the presence of unusually high levels of mortality from accidents and other external causes, which are typically associated with alcoholism.
Some researchers regarded the rise in infant mortality as largely real, a consequence of worsening health conditions and services.
As the detailed data series that was ultimately published in the late 1980s showed, the reported IMR for the Soviet Union as a whole increased from 24.7 in 1970 to a peak of 31.4 in 1976.
[23] Other ethnic groups included Abkhaz, Adyghes, Aleuts, Assyrians, Avars, Bulgarians, Buryats, Chechens, Chinese, Cossacks, Crimean Tatars, Evenks, Finns, Gagauz, Greeks, Hungarians, Ingushes, Inuit, Kalmyks, Karakalpaks, Karelians, Kets, Koreans, Lezgins, Maris, Mongols, Nenetses, Ossetians, Roma, Romanians, Tats, Tuvans, Udmurts, and Yakuts.
At first, this was due to the incorporation of new territories westward in Europe after World War II, such as the Polish Eastern Borderlands, the Baltic states, Carpathian Ruthenia, and Bessarabia.
This resulted in an increase of non-Russian ethnic groups, especially those who were Belarusian, Ukrainian, Polish, Moldovan, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian.
However, starting in the 1960s, the decline of the Russian majority was mainly driven by indigenous ethnic groups residing in the Caucasian and Central Asian Soviet republics.
The rise of non-Russians, especially Soviet Muslims from the Caucasus and Central Asia can be explained by analysing the different patterns of total fertility rates among ethnic groups.
The same trend could be found in the Baltic and Western regions of the USSR, which each of the Soviet republics' titular nationality approaching sub-replacement fertility.
[1] Some indigenous pagan belief systems existed in the Siberian and Russian Far Eastern lands in the local populations.
[31] Overall Soviet citizens spoke more than 200 languages and dialects (at least 18 with more than 1 million speakers); Slavic group: 75%, other Indo-European: 8%, Altaic: 12%, Uralic: 3%, Caucasian: 2% (1990 est.
