AHC: Lower C. Asian Birthrates

Kibbutznik

A major issue faced by Soviet leadership was the fact that in the late 20th century, Central Asian birthrates were much higher than Slavic ones, with projections showing that Central Asians would overthrow the traditional Russian/Slavic majority by the 2000's.

With a post-1945 pod, what conditions need to be met to lower the central Asian birthrates/population growth?

No sterilization or genocide, please.
 
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Obergruppenführer Smith

Banned
I don't see how this is possible without Gandhi-level oppressive forced sterilization in the name of population control. The Central Asian Republics did not suffer losses in World
War II as severe as those suffered by the Russians, Balts, Ukrainians, and Belorussians and hence do not show a decline between 1970 and 1979 in the number of people below the working ages. This by itself easily snowballs into higher fertility, never mind that there was increasing adult male mortality in the European part of the USSR, especially between age 40 and 60. Finally, there is the simple issue of the disincentive of having children in the several families to a single flat system done in the more densely populated European parts.

Basically, you have to butterfly away the massive demographical disaster that was the WW2 for European USSR. The Central Asian birthrates were quite a natural thing given the relatively intact young population and room to expand.
 

Minchandre

Increased prosperity and education to Central Asia. This pretty consistently reduces population growth.

You could also implement a China-style 1 or 2 child policy; such a policy would have a far greater impact on people with many children than on people with few (as most "European" Soviet citizens tended to have). You can also hand out extra children under such a scheme in a highly discriminatory way, using difficult to quantify measures that somehow always seem to qualify the ethnic Russians to have more kids, which leaving the ethnic Uzbeks with only the one.
 

Kibbutznik

Could the proportionally higher growth rate be counteracted through immigration?

Perhaps the Soviets make Xinjiang into an independent nation during the Chinese Civil War, and promote Islamic immigration to the 'People's Islamic Republic'?
 
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Napoleon IV

Central Asia would have to undergo the demographic transition, which means they need to have things like urbanization, greater women's rights, and access to family planning tools like contraceptives. The problem with that is that Soviets treated the Central Asian states like colonies, so development is seriously hindered.
 

rfmcdonald

I'm not sure this is a possibility. The European populations of the Soviet Union had gone through the demographic transition by the end of the mid-20th century, while Central Asians were just beginning. Jumpstarting human development in central Asia is a way to trigger an earlier transition, but frankly, I suspect that human development in the region was maxxed out as it was under the Soviet Union. Comparing Tajikistan to Afghanistan, say, or Central Asia more broadly to Iran or even Turkey, reveals that human development went quickly.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
CaliGuy said:
Frankly, I doubt that this would work very well without the use of force; after all, Uyghurs are a different ethnic group than the Central Asian ethnic groups are.
Click to expand...
Also, what exactly would be appealing about Xinjiang (as opposed to, say, Moscow and Leningrad) for Central Asians to immigrate there en masse?
 
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