In a recent post, I said “Regardless of what happens in the War in Ukraine, Russia has 20 years at most before its political system breaks down.” I did not go into why that was the case because it was not main focus of that particular post so today I figured I would rectify that.

Like most things in the modern world, the root of the danger that threaten Russia’s political system are demographic. But there are some nuances with Russian demographics that make the next 20 years particularly fraught with danger for the Russian state.

The first and most obvious demographic hazard is Putin’s age. He is currently 71 years old. It stretches plausibility that he will still be functioning 20 years. For context: Stalin died at 74. Nikita Khrushchev was 77 years old when he died. Leonid Brezhnev was 75 years old when he died. Boris Yeltsin was 76 years old when he died. By that standard, Putin does not have long to go.

Now Russian males live famously unhealthy lives. One could argue that Putin is an exception that rule (he certainly would). But even if you look at the healthier and longer lived Chinese autocrats as a better example of Putin’s likely reign you still see that it is very unlikely to get 20 more years of Putin. Mao died at 82. Chiang Kai-shek was 87 when he died. Deng made it to 92 years old but he retired from official work some 10 years earlier which might have helped him live longer.

The bottom line is that Putin is almost certainly going to go in the next 20 years. And when long lived autocrats leave power, it often leads to a time of chaos in the countries they used to rule. This seems particularly likely in Putin’s case as he seems to have gone out of his way to not have an obvious successor.

Another demographic hazard facing Russia is the wave of retirements that it will be facing in 20 years time. Russian leadership has long known that their retirement system is not sustainable. Indeed, Putin’s most controversial act as leader of Russia was changes he made to the pension system.

Nonetheless, woman in Russia (the only group that really matters in Russia from a pension standpoint since Russia men have such a short life span) get to retire at 60. This made a lot of people in Russia really angry because woman used to be able to retire at 55 but Putin saw the demographic bulge coming towards the retirement system and took steps to head it off in his lifetime. Problem is that bulge is still going to hit but now it will hit after Putin is dead. If you look at the chart of Russian demographics you will see that it will start to peak in about 20 years. But just looking at the peak is missing the picture because just as critical is the huge hole in the twenty year old range. Those people are going to be at “peak earnings” at the same time a big wave of retirements are starting. In other words, to get a full picture of the coming disaster you have to look at how many people are going to be in the work force (or the lack there of) as well as looking at the number of people who are going to need to be supported.

Granted, this issue will not start to peak until the end of our 20 year period. But it will be a steadily escalating issue that will make all other issues worse during the next 20 years. And likely it will only start to bite after Putin is dead. Arguably this is worse from a Russian stability perspective then if it hit when an established leader like Putin was still in charge and might have the authority to deal with the resulting issues in some fashion.

The next issue confronting Russia is the growth in minority populations who might have other allegiances within Russia. This is one that is hard to address because of the lack of trustworthy Russian data on the subject. It seems likely that the Russian Census is deliberately undercounting minorities or the minorities themselves are reluctant to self identify to Russia authorities.

Notwithstanding this problem, there are some things we can say with a high degree of confidence. The first is that at least 10% of the Russian population is Muslim (some sources say as high as 20%). One thing everyone agrees on is that Muslims in Russia have a total fertility rate is above replacement where as ethnic Russians are below the replacement fertility rate. The UN says the Muslim TRF is 2.3 children per woman. Common (and wrong) claims are that Russian fertility is 1.4 children per woman. We know this figure is wrong for ethnic Russians because it is the figure for the country as a whole. Because minority populations (mostly Siberian natives plus Muslims of one form or another) make up roughly 20% or more of the Russian population even by conservative estimates and the minority populations almost all have a higher fertility rate then ethnic Russians, we can be confident that the Russian total fertility rate is below 1.4.

Even if you take the 1.4 as being the correct stand in for ethnic Russian total fertility, you still are left with a scenario where Muslim youth population increases by 33% relative to the ethnic Russian youth population in 20 years time. Granted, there will still be a large overhang of older Russians, but it is late teens and twenties that stir up most of the trouble when things get tough. In that respect, the numbers of Muslims relative to the numbers of ethnic Russians is going to dramatically increase in the next twenty years even if you take the official statistics at face value. Given that very few people in Russia or out of Russia believe that relations between Muslims and ethnic Russians are great, this does not speak well of Russia’s future. And when you factor in the fact that actual relative increase is more likely to be 50% or higher, it gets even worse.

All these things have been seen by various demographers for a long time now. There have been three saving graces that have been keeping Russia functional in spite of these forces. The first is the relative political stability brought by Putin. There is a reason why he is popular. The second is the migration of various ethnic Russians back to Russia as they decided that don’t like being minority populations in countries that they used to dominate. Up until recently, this has helped counterbalance the fall in birth rates in terms of keeping Russia ethnically Russian although this benefit had largely ended even before the Ukraine war. But the most important reason that Russia is doing well is the oil and gas industry. This is an industry that generates large amounts of money for the Russian government without the Russian government needing to have a functioning western style economy.

This last reason is also Russia’s greatest near term weakness. Oil and gas can give but it can also take away when it is the core of the economy. The big problem with the petroleum industry is that it amplifies normal economic cycles. When the world economy is doing well you do better than everyone else because more people want oil then the oil industry can satisfy. This means that oil prices soar to until the poorer consumers are priced out of the market but everyone producing oil benefits from this price rise. But when the world economy is doing poorly, often not all oil products that can be produced are wanted by consumers (i.e. there is glut). This means there is a race to the bottom as oil producers get to see who can produce oil at the lowest cost and can afford to sell it for the lowest price. This hurts the higher cost producers because they have all this expensive equipment pumping oil that they can’t just shut off on a dime but now they are selling their product at a loss. The bottom line is that oil industry is prone to a boom and bust cycle because it is hard to bring new supply on line and harder than many people think to shut off oil and gas producing equipment once it is started up. Many people don’t realize this is such a problem in the oil industry because they look at Arab producers (who have the lowest cost oil wells in the word in the world and hence often still making profits when the rest of the oil producing world is not) and think that oil producers do well even it bad times. But looking at the broader picture shows that most oil producing countries suffer really badly in an economic downturn or whenever a supply glut comes along.

In fact, one of the largest factors in the fall of the Soviet Union was the fact that they let themselves get dependent on oil and gas money and then the bottom fell out of the oil and gas market. Like most Russian weakness, Putin (or at least his younger self) was well aware of this problem. It was for this reason that he built up such large currency reserves to cushion Russia from such swings. While this was a wise idea in the abstract, it does not fix the underlying weakness of the Russian economy being a one trick pony. That is a long term recipe for instability regardless of the other issues that Russia faces. This instability has played out even in recent post Soviet Russian history and it seems likely that it will again.

All of these issues were reasons to be pessimistic about Russia’s near term future before Russia took on the extremely foolish decision to invade Ukraine in force. This has made all of Russia’s problems worse. It has led to a large outflow of young Russians to other countries. It has lead to worsening relations between ethnic Russians and various minatory groups. It is running down the large currency reserves that Russia worked so long and hard to build up. It is gradually grinding down oil and gas industry as equipment is being destroyed and they lack the means to provide needed investment. With of all of these factors converging towards a bad end, it is hard to see how Russia can avoid major turmoil in the near future regardless of how the war.

All that said, there is one advantage that Russia has that rest of the world is lacking. It is mainstream discourse in Russia to talk about most of these problems. The younger Putin had a good grasp of Russia issues. He knew about the retirement problem and took steps to address it. He knows ethnic Russian demographics are not sustainable and has made half hearted efforts to address it. And he clearly understood the dangers of Russia’s reliance on the extremely cyclic oil and gas industry. As a result, these issues are discussed at a mainstream level in a Russia in way that comparable issues in China or Europe are not.

This level of discussion does not seem to have done Russia a lot of good. In part this is because of the two issues they can’t talk about (Putin’s lack of succession and the fact that the Ukraine war is making everything worse) in part because Russians have the same issues with the addictive nature of the modern lifestyle that leads to demographic collapse as everyone else. But on a psychological level, Russians seem much more prepared for everything to turn really badly then other people. Often this mental preparation is scary (if Russia does not exist, the world does not need to exist is a refrain I have heard from Russian media more than once) but the very fact that Russians say these scary things show that the collapse of the society is on their minds in a way that does not seem to be the case for the western world.

I bring this up because there is a lot of people online gleefully predicting the collapse of Russia. I can’t see any reason for them to be wrong. But what does the collapse of nation that is already saying that the world does not need to exist without them look like? And how many nations are better off if you run the numbers 20 years out? USA is looking at bankruptcy in that time period at the very least. Much of Europe is in a demographic situation that is as bad or worse than Russia’s. Japan, South Korea, and China are all heading to demographic oblivion at a historically unprecedented rate. A lot of nations are going to see serious problems in the next 20 years but only the Russians seem to have a mainstream realization of that fact even if the only solution they seem to express is a willingness to burn the whole world with them when they go down.