Demographics of Saint Petersburg

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Satellite picture of St. Peterburg

Saint Petersburg is the second largest city in Russia, after Moscow. 2002 census recorded population of the federal subject 4,661,219, or 3.21% of the total population of Russia. The city with its vicinity has an estimated population of about 6 million people.

St. Petersburg is the third largest city in Europe, and the largest city that is not a capital.

1 Ethnicity
2 Population
3 Housing
4 References

[edit] Ethnicity

Soviet period borough and tram

The 2002 census recorded twenty-two ethnic groups of more than two thousand persons each. The ethnic composition was: Russian 84.72% • Ukrainian 1.87% • Belarusians 1.17% • Jewish 0.78% • Tatar 0.76% • Armenian 0.41% • Azeri 0.36% • Georgian 0.22% • Chuvash 0.13% • Polish 0.10% • Finnish 0.08% • Korean 0.08% • German 0.08% • Moldovan 0.07% • Mordovian 0.07% • Uzbek 0.06% • Kazakh 0.06% • Ossetian 0.06% • Bashkir 0.05% • Tajik 0.05% • Estonian 0.05% • Karelian 0.05% • Lithuanian 0.6%, and many other ethnic groups of less than two thousand persons each. 7.89% of the inhabitants declined to state their ethnicity.^[1] As of 2001, 41 percent of Petersburgers identified themselves as Russian Orthodox, another 21% called themselves Christians in general. Almost a half of both groups were at the same time self-reported non-believers. The number of churched parishioners of the Russian Orthodox Church are estimated as less than 5%.^[2]^[3]

Saint Petersburg has always been populated mostly by Russians, albeit with several sizeable ethnic minorities, such as Germans, Ukrainians, Finns, and people from Eastern Europe, among others. In 1800 an estimated 200 to 300 thousand lived in the city.^{[citation needed]} After the emancipation of serfs in 1861, former serfs started arriving to the capital as workers, boosting population from half a million to 1439.6 thousand recorded in the census of 1900.

[edit] Population

Bombings of the Nevsky prospekt. Nazi bombings killed thousands of civilians in Leningrad

In 1897, according to the Russian Empire Census, the population of Saint Petersburg was 1,264,920, of them (by native language) 86.49% Russians, 4.01% Germans, 2.91% Poles, 1.66% Finns, 0.97% Estonians, 0.95% Jews, 0.50% Latvians, 0.41% Ukrainians, 0.39% Tatars, 0,37% Swedes, 0.30% Lithuanians, 0.26% French people, 0.23% Belarusians, and a small number of others.^{[citation needed]}

The 20th century saw hectic ups and downs in population. From 2.4 million in 1916 it had dropped to less than 740 thousand by 1920 during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Russian Civil War. Then the influx of peasantry contributed to population growth to 3 million people, although in the 1930 the growth was unstable due to the Great Purge.^{[citation needed]} The sizeable minorities of Germans, Poles, Finns, Estonians and Latvians were almost completely expelled from Leningrad by the Soviet government in the 1930s-1940s, as the city fell into the border zone.^[4] From 1941 to the end of 1943, population dropped from 3 million to less than 700 thousand, as people died in battles, starved to death during the Siege of Leningrad or were evacuated. In 1944, after the siege, some part of the evacuees returned, but most influx was due to migration from other parts of the Soviet Union. The city absorbed 3 million people in the 1950s and grew over 5 million in the 1980s. From 1991 to 2006 the city's population decreased to current 4,6 million, while the suburban population increased due to privatisation of land and massive suburban housing construction.^[5]^[6] Birth rate has long been considerably lower than death rate. Therefore the population is aging, people 65 and older comprises more than 20%, the mean age is about 40 years.^[7]

[edit] Housing

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People in urban Saint Petersburg mostly live in apartment blocks. Between 1918 and 1990s, the Soviets nationalised housing and many were forced to share their apartments as communal apartments (kommunalkas) with other residents of the city. In the 1930s some 68 percent of the Leningrad population lived in shared apartments. Leningrad was the largest city of the Soviet Union by the number of kommunalkas. As new boroughs were built on the outskirts in the 1950s-1980s, over half a million low income families eventually received free apartments, and additional hundred thousand condos were purchased by the middle class. While much economic and social activity is still concentrated in and around the city centre, which is the richest part of Saint Petersburg, the new boroughs has been used mostly as many-storied urban commuter areas. Their gentrification has yet to begin. Although progress has been made in resettling residents of kommunalkas in the 1990s, shared apartments are still not uncommon. In the last 15 years of de-nationalisation most of residential property has been transferred free of charge, or at a small fraction of its value, to millions of legal residents of St. Petersburg.

Undocumented migration and homeless children are serious problems. As the International Labour Organization estimated, there were up to 16,000 children living on the street in 2000.^[8]