Demographic effects of deportation: seeking the causes of high fertility rates in the North Caucasus, Russia

Central Asian Survey. 2023. Vol. 42. No. 1. P. 191–210.

Ermolin I., Suvorkov P., Fedorova M.

This article explores how the deportation of the Dargin people in the Caucasus affects intergenerational fertility rates and assesses the results of the experiment. The authors paid attention to two Dargin settlements located in the foothills and Mid-Mountains areas of Dagestan, the first of which was subject to forced replacement, but the other was left intact. Inhabitants of both settlements have close kinship ties and are tied by commodity trade as well. The authors obtained data through municipal registers and an additional survey conducted in the studied localities. We used event history analysis as the main methodology. The main findings cover the following: the foothill settlers managed to keep the social norms along with handicrafts that existed before deportation which brought about the intergenerational continuity in procreative behaviour and higher childbirth rates in the foothill settlement that have persisted for a long time.

Keywords: Caucasus, event history analysis, deportation, cohort fertility, radical islamism