PSCRP-BESA Reports No 148 (August 25, 2025)
by Alexander Shpunt
Depopulation—especially in the form of the departure of able-bodied families—is considered today a key socio-economic trend in the Baltic countries. Many researchers – not just journalists in mass media—call this depopulation a “national catastrophe.”
According to the 2024 World Factbook, Latvia ranked first among European countries in terms of depopulation, Lithuania ranked second, and Estonia ranked fifth, behind Poland and Romania. The numbers really do look like a demographic catastrophe.
Estonia, the most demographically prosperous of the Baltic countries, showed 9,691 births and 15,756 deaths last year, in 2024. In Latvia the situation is the same: 12,571 births last year (-13.2% compared to 2023) and 26,341 deaths (-6%); natural decline –13,770. The same happens in Lithuania: 22,068 births, 42,884 deaths; total fertility rate 1.27.
It would seem that the similar economic parameters of these five countries—Estonia, Poland, Romania, Latvia, and Lithuania—point to the underlying reason for depopulation. All of them serve as donors of labor resources to “old Europe.” For their citizens, the status of being EU members makes relocation and employment in more developed countries with higher wages significantly easier. Since it is primarily young and working-age families who move, they tend to postpone having children until after resettling; in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, it is mainly the grandparents who remain, while their grandchildren are raised abroad as “Europeans.”
According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Migration Department, about 461,000 Lithuanians live abroad, with Germany and Ireland being the largest host countries. The figure is a huge number for a nation with fewer than 2.5 million inhabitants. Moreover, we are seeing migration motivated specifically by employment: Lithuania is among the countries with the fastest growth in the issuance of PD A1 certificates for those working in two or more countries (the category of multi-country employment).
Extremely low pensions deter elderly residents of the Baltics from emigrating. In January 2024, Latvia’s Ministry of Welfare reported that, including supplements, the average pension stood at €563. In Estonia, the figure was somewhat higher at €680, while in Lithuania, in March 2024, it was €596.19. At such pension levels, even €500 in remittances from adult children working in “old” Europe becomes a decisive factor for economic well-being. According to the Bank of Lithuania, private remittances to Lithuania in 2023 amounted to €903.26 million (1.4% of GDP).
At first glance, the reasons for depopulation are obvious. The reasoning outlined above appears correct but somewhat superficial. The economic, mercantile motive for population outflow accurately describes the present situation, but it does not explain why things turned out this way. It does not address why, after the collapse of the USSR and the rapid integration into the European Union, the Baltic states were left without socio-economic stabilizers—factors that would have kept their populations rooted in their traditional places of residence.
Had such stabilizers existed, the economic model might have developed in the opposite direction. One could reasonably assume that European entrepreneurs, recognizing the availability of large groups of well-educated, disciplined, and relatively inexpensive workers, would have started developing production facilities directly in the Baltics—as we see happening today, for example, in Vietnam. But this did not occur, and in the Baltics labor migration grew into full-fledged depopulation. So, what caused this particular demographic trajectory?
The Legacy of Stalinism: The Death of the Baltic Village
A key factor behind the rapid outflow of the Baltic states’ qualified and inexpensive labor force to “old Europe,” before Western European investors arrived in their own countries, lies in the destruction of the social roots of Baltic society—specifically, the rural way of life in these territories.
Before the Second World War, the Baltics were an agrarian region, with the majority of the population living in rural areas. The settlement system consisted mainly of small villages and farmsteads. In Latvia, some eastern districts (Latgale) were dominated by villages, while in other regions the population mostly lived on individual farmsteads. These farmsteads functioned as self-contained economic units with land ownership. The distance between homesteads ranged from 100–150 meters to 1–3 kilometers.
The situation in Estonia differed somewhat, as the land reform of 1919 nationalized noble estates and divided them into smaller plots, which were transferred to local landless peasants for farming in the homestead style. From the expropriated lands, the state created about 56,000 small new farms, whose owners were primarily landless Estonian peasants. Similarly, Lithuania carried out a comparable land reform aimed at forming a prosperous peasant class by creating a homestead-based farming system. By 1938, homestead landownership accounted for 84% of all peasant land in Lithuania.
Thus, the social foundation was not only individual farming (which in the West would be called a farm) but also individual settlement, outside of large villages—the homestead model of land use.
This settlement pattern did not fit the needs of the Soviet regime established in 1940. Despite attempts to establish a Soviet agricultural system in 1940–1941, it wasn’t until around 1949 that they began to implement it in earnest. Under threat of deportation, peasants were forced to “join” collective farms. Stalin’s regime adopted a tactic of forced resettlement. At the end of March 1949, mass deportations of the Baltic republics’ inhabitants to Siberia and the Far North began. During the major March deportation (Operation “Priboi”) alone, 94,779 people were deported. Official figures show that 33,496 were deported from Lithuania, 41,445 from Latvia, and 20,660 from Estonia.
As a result, the remaining rural population was stripped of its traditional way of life. Collectivization was directly tied to the transformation of rural settlements. The goal was to remove people from their homesteads and resettle them into collective farm villages—sometimes larger than small towns. By the mid-1980s, agricultural enterprises (kolkhozes and sovkhozes) covered about 70% of Lithuania’s territory, and large rural settlements accounted for 70–75% of all Lithuanian villages. This sharply contrasted with the traditional homestead-based settlement structure that had existed just half a century earlier.
Even those born in these new large, artificial “main estates” of collective and state farms felt no emotional attachment to their homes. These places carried no family history or ancestral ties. And even if, by Soviet standards, such settlements offered decent living conditions, their residents often perceived them as prison camps—without guards, but with the right to leave. They had not chosen this place or way of life. The Soviet urban planning strategy promoted the construction of urban-type apartment buildings in these “main estates” as part of a broader ideology of “merging city and countryside.” Moving from one’s own house into an apartment in a multi-story building further severed historical ties with the land. Importantly, this was not ethnic in character: such a “break with the homeland” affected all rural inhabitants of the Baltics—Russians, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians alike.
The collapse of the Soviet system and the subsequent shift in economic structures also radically altered settlement trajectories. The inherited network of settlements, adapted to collective farming, no longer matched the new economic realities. In the former “main estates” of kolkhozes and sovkhozes, the dissolution of collective farms and the rapid decline in agricultural employment became decisive factors of transformation.
In 2023, employment in agriculture in Latvia accounted for 6.75% of total employment. This figure had been falling for four consecutive years and was 3.4 times lower than in 1991. According to the World Bank, agricultural employment in Estonia in this period was only 2.6% of the workforce. In Lithuania in 2023, 5.06% of total employment was in agriculture, a 4.76-fold decrease since 1991. In 1991, agricultural employment reached its peak, accounting for 24.10% of the total workforce.
This dramatic decline in agricultural employment, combined with the earlier destruction of the homestead-based farming system during the Soviet period, produced a population free of local ties and traditions—ready to leave their homeland easily and without deep hesitation, in search of any available work in “old Europe,” even in jobs unattractive to Western Europeans themselves.
No factors or circumstances kept these families in the Baltics. They had no access to the traditional rural work of the past. They had no ancestral homesteads. They had no tradition of working independently on their own small plots. What they did have was a good education, a tradition of diligence, a European identity, and EU passports. This rapid relocation of young families from both rural and urban regions of the Baltics occurred so quickly that it outpaced business interest in the region’s cheap labor force.
The project of a “European Vietnam”—a manufacturing hub for EU countries—simply could not keep up with the Baltic youth, who were already rapidly leaving for work in “old Europe.”
Alexander Shpunt is an Israeli and Russian researcher and expert in the theory and practice of information and analytical work in the field of politics and resides in Haifa. Since 2016 he has served as a professor at the National Research University “Moscow Higher School of Economics. In 1999–2011 he also served as the executive director of the “Effective Policy Foundation”, the largest think tank in the RF at that time, and in 2011 founded and headed the Institute of Political Analysis Tools, specializing in systems for monitoring political behavior.