Article: Russia
Section: Demographics

Question: Near what mountain chain is population density the highest in Russia?

Ethnic Russians comprise 81% of the country's population.
The Russian Federation is also home to several sizeable minorities.
In all, 160 different other ethnic groups and indigenous peoples live within its borders.
Though Russia's population is comparatively large, its density is low because of the country's enormous size.
Population is densest in European Russia, near the Ural Mountains, and in southwest Siberia.
73% of the population lives in urban areas while 27% in rural ones.
The results of the 2010 Census show a total population of 142,856,536.
Russia's population peaked at 148,689,000 in 1991, just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
It began to experience a rapid decline starting in the mid-1990s.
The decline has slowed to near stagnation in recent years because of reduced death rates, increased birth rates and increased immigration.
In 2009, Russia recorded annual population growth for the first time in fifteen years, with total growth of 10,500.
279,906 migrants arrived to the Russian Federation the same year, of which 93% came from CIS countries.
The number of Russian emigrants steadily declined from 359,000 in 2000 to 32,000 in 2009.
There are also an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants from the ex-Soviet states in Russia.
Roughly 116 million ethnic Russians live in Russia and about 20 million more live in other former republics of the Soviet Union, mostly in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
The 2010 census recorded 81% of the population as ethnically Russian, and 19% as other ethnicities: 3.7% Tatars; 1.4% Ukrainians; 1.1% Bashkirs; 1% Chuvashes; 11.8% others and unspecified.
According to the Census, 84.93% of the Russian population belongs to European ethnic groups (Slavic, Germanic, Finnic other than Ugric, Greek, and others).
This is a decline from the 2002, when they constituted for more than 86% of the population.
Russia's birth rate is higher than that of most European countries (12.6 births per 1000 people in 2010 compared to the European Union average of 9.90 per 1000), but its death rate is also substantially higher (in 2010, Russia's death rate was 14.3 per 1000 people compared to the EU average of 10.28 per 1000).
The Russian Ministry of Health and Social Affairs predicted that by 2011 the death rate would equal the birth rate because of increase in fertility and decline in mortality.
The government is implementing a number of programs designed to increase the birth rate and attract more migrants.
Monthly government child-assistance payments were doubled to US$55, and a one-time payment of US$9,200 was offered to women who had a second child since 2007.
In 2006, in a bid to compensate for the country's demographic decline, the Russian government started simplifying immigration laws and launched a state program "for providing assistance to voluntary immigration of ethnic Russians from former Soviet republics".
In 2009 Russia experienced its highest birth rate since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In 2012, the birth rate increased again.
Russia recorded 1,896,263 births, the highest number since 1990, and even exceeding annual births during the period 1967–1969, with a TFR of about 1.7, the highest since 1991.
(Source: Vital statistics table below)In August 2012, as the country saw its first demographic growth since the 1990s, President Putin declared that Russia's population could reach 146 million by 2025, mainly as a result of immigration.