“For every ten girls there’s only nine guys”: Soviet World War II losses and the resulting sex ratios

Last week, my Russian cinema class watched and discussed Cranes are Flying, a Soviet cinematic masterpiece which focuses on the tragic side of World War II and the physical and emotional wounds it left behind. But the wounds were also demographic, and these wounds have hardly healed even now, 72 years after the war. The estimated 8.7 million military deaths, with significantly more men than women among them, left a huge disparity between the genders: far more women than men in the post-war period. In the 1960s and 70s, a popular Soviet song claimed that “for every ten girls, according to statistics, there’s only nine guys”. That, however, was not the case in real life: according to the 1970 census, for every ten women between ages 30 and 69, there were only 7.4 men in the same age bracket. By 1979, that number was up to 7.84, and the situation was a bit better among the younger generation. But even today Russia has not recovered the sex ratios of the pre-war and pre-1930s Great Terror period. The graph from an article by Nikolay Savchenko in Demoscope shows that the biggest drop in the men-to-women ratio occurred in the 20-year period that encompasses the war, between the 1939 census and that of 1959:

Sex ratio in the Russian Empire/USSR population data: the number of men per 1,000 women, aged 30-69

 

It is easy to blame the skewed sex ratios on the Nazi occupation: after all, nearly 2 million square km of Soviet territory and 45% of its population have been occupied during the war. But a closer look at the demographic data suggests that this is not the case. Although the three Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), as well as Belarus and Ukraine, were occupied in their entirety, it is the RSFSR (Russia), most of which was not under Nazi occupation, which showed the lowest sex ratio in the first post-war census of 1959 (chart from Savchenko’s publication, linked to above):

Sex ratios by republic: men per 1,000 women, aged 30-69 (1959 census)

 

Within Russia, there is no contrast in sex ratios between regions that were under Nazi occupation and those that were not. According to Savchenko, the lowest sex ratios (among those who were in age cohorts subject to mobilization during the war) is found in three of the regions in the Middle Volga: Mari ASSR (507), Chuvashia (517), and Mordovia (521). Next come three Russian oblasts, Ivanovo (528), Kirov (535), and Kostroma (538)—none of which were occupied by the Nazis!

Instead, the enormously skewed sex ratio must be due to the Soviet mobilization and military losses. As suggested by Savchenko, this can be seen from two statistics: (1) differences in sex ratios between age cohorts that were subject to mobilization and those that were not, and (2) differences in sex ratios between different regions of Ukraine and Belarus. Let’s begin by looking at the data concerning the age cohorts: among those born in 1930 (aged 15 in 1945), the sex ratio is 964—pretty much what would be expected in peacetime. The ratio declines as one goes back in birth years: among those born in 1926 (they were subject to mobilization in the last year of the war), the sex ratio is 829, and among those born in 1923 (and thus subject to mobilization from 1941 onward) the ratio is merely 644. In other words, for every ten 36-year-old women in 1959 there were only 6.44 male contemporaries, a far cry from the “nine guys” that the song claimed. This chart (based on the figures cited in Savchenko’s work) is easily explained: the older the guys were in 1941 and so the longer they were subject to mobilization, the more likely that they would be drafted and, sadly, that they would not come back from the war. The only anomaly is the data point for those born in 1927: the sex ratio for this age cohort is higher than for the next younger cohort, born in 1928. According to Savchenko, “this is a reflection of the fact that throughout the USSR, about 300-400 thousand young men born in 1925-1926 allegedly changed their papers to show 1927 as their birth date” (translation mine).

The second type of evidence that underscores the enormous effect of Soviet military losses on the remaining population structure involves sex ratios in Belarus and Ukraine. Since both of this republics were under Nazi occupation, based on the factor alone, one does not expect any differences within each republic, but that is not the case. Looking at those aged 31-70 in 1959 (the age bracket that made the men subject to mobilization),  Savchenko calculated that the sex ratio is highest in the westernmost parts of Belarus, and declines as one moves east. Thus, “in Grodno oblast of Belorussia there were 707 men for 1,000 women, in Brest oblast — 708, in Molodechno oblast — 700. But in the centrally located Minsk oblast the figure is 615, and in the eastern oblasts of Belorussia the difference [between the number of men and women] is even more conspicuous: in Vitebsk — 581, in Gomel — 578, in Mogilev — 562” (translation mine). If the Nazi occupation were the sole factor, this distribution would be counter-intuitive: after all, western areas such as Brest were under Nazi attack first and were generally occupied the longest. The real reason for this distribution, Savchenko suggests, is whether the area was part of the USSR, and hence subject to its mobilization, in the inter-war period. Western parts of Belarus were taken over by the USSR in the fall of 1939, before which time they were part of Poland.

The situation is similar in Ukraine, as Savchenko claims. For this post and for my class, I’ve created the map below, where the sex ratios for age cohorts that were subject to mobilization during the war are shown by oblast (Savchenko himself lists the figures only for half a dozen or so of the oblasts; I have calculated the remaining ratios based on the 1959 census data here). The base map here is one that shows territorial changes in Ukraine (I’ve discussed it also in my 2014 post):

As can be seen from this map, the highest (hence, most like peace-time) sex ratio, 843, is found in the westernmost region of Transcarpathia, which became part of Ukraine (and part of the USSR) only after the war. Areas that became part of the USSR in 1939 (Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Volyn, and most of the Rovno oblast) or in 1940 (Chernovtsy oblast and a substantial part of the Odessa oblast) exhibit fairly high sex ratios as well. The contrast between “Western Ukraine” (oblasts that were taken over by the USSR in 1939-40) and their immediate neighbors to the east (Khmelnitsky, Zhitomir, and Vinnitsa oblasts), as well as oblasts in central Ukraine (Kiev, Chernigov, Poltava, Cherkassy, and Sumy oblasts), is quite conspicuous. Overall, areas that were not part of the Soviet Union before 1939 have sex ratios in the high 600s, in the 700s or even above 800, while virtually all regions that were in the USSR prior to 1939 have sex ratios below 650, and about half of them—below 600. (The only exceptions are the industrially vital Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine and the city of Kiev, with the sex ratios of 670 and 668, respectively.)

In light of these figures, it appears that the timing of becoming a part of the Soviet Union is the best predictor of the severity of the sex ratio bias: the longer an area was part of the USSR, the higher the discrepancy between the two genders (and the lower the sex ratio figure) in the immediate pre-war period. This generalization is further confirmed by another data point, alluded to by Savchenko: Tyva, which became a part of the USSR only in 1944 and was little affected by the Soviet mobilization, has one of the highest sex ratios of any region in the USSR in 1959: 903, based on the 1959 census data here. (Again, only people aged 30-69 in 1959, the age cohorts that were subject to mobilization during the war, are being considered.)

All these figures underscore the immense human losses that the Soviet Union suffered, the “cost in blood” of the victory over Nazism whose 72nd anniversary is being commemorated today. These losses, skewed heavily against the “stronger sex”, were felt for a long time after the last shots were fired, and are perhaps still felt today. One consequence of this shortage of men is that the birth rate after the war, though higher than during the war, never reached the pre-war level, in sharp contrast to the U.S. and Britain, which experienced the “baby boom” in the same period. (The birth rates are shown by the blue line in chart below, from http://e-lib.gasu.ru/eposobia/minaev/R_1_7.html.)

Birth rate (blue line) and death rate (pink line) in the Russian Empire and the USSR

 

But the consequences of the skewed sex ratios after the war may be psychological as well: a whole generation of children, most notably boys, grew up with few fathers around, and thus with few role models of how to be a man, a husband, or a father. Is that perhaps the reason why the protagonist of our next film, Autumn Marathon, is so weak, meek, indecisive, and spineless? Nor is he alone among male cinema characters of that time; in fact, it seems that many if not most of the cinematic “good guys” in the late 1970s-early 1980s were very much like Buzykin.

Thoughts, anyone?