BULYAVINO, Russia – Along a snow-packed road two hours off the highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg lies the village of Bulyavino, population 13 people, a bull, a cow, two sheep, four ducks, half a dozen chickens, and assorted cats and dogs.

“We used to have another cow but it got sick and died two years ago,” Boris Vasiliev, born and raised in the village, said ruefully.

Thirty years ago, Bulyavino was a thriving Russian village, with more than 30 families, a school, a local shop, and even a doctor’s office. Today, Bulyavino is practically a ghost town, its picturesque log houses largely abandoned and its population reduced to a few lonely pensioners. Soon, they too will be gone.

“In 10 or 15 years there will be nothing left. I’m the youngest one here and I’ll be dead by then,” said Mr. Vasiliev, 58. “It’s hopeless,” added his wife Nina, also 58.

Across Russia, rural communities like Bulyavino are dying. Russia’s 2002 census, the first since 1989, found that of the country’s 155,000 villages, 13,000 have been deserted and another 35,000 have seen their populations dwindle to fewer than 10 people.

Much of the blame for the death of traditional Russian village life lies with a mass exodus from rural to urban areas. But the thousands of abandoned villages dotted across the country also graphically illustrate a dramatic population crisis that could see Russia lose up to 50 million people in the next 50 years.

“The situation is incredibly serious, we could lose a third of our population by 2050,” says the director of the Moscow-based Center for Demography and Human Ecology, Anatoly Vishnevsky.

Russia’s population has already fallen from 149 million to 144 million since 1992, according to the State Statistics Committee. A declining birthrate and a sharp drop in life expectancy are blamed for the precipitous drop. The rampant poverty and social upheaval that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union have meant fewer families can afford to support more than one child. At the same time, alcoholism, poor diet, and dramatic levels of suicide and accidental deaths have all meant more and more Russians, especially men, are dying younger. Death rates are soaring for stroke, lung cancer, stomach cancer, tuberculosis, and heart disease, which was Russia’s top killer last year. Experts are saying Russia is also on the verge of a major AIDS epidemic, with more than 250,000 Russians expected to die every year from the disease by 2020.

Average life expectancy for a Russian man is now just 58.6 years, lower than in Bangladesh and down from 63.4 years in 1990. The average Russian woman lives 73 years. American life expectancy on the other hand, is at 74.7 years for men, and 79.8 years for women.

The Tver region, in which Bulyavino lies, has been one of the hardest hit. The region’s population has fallen from 1.8 million in 1959 to about 1.4 million today. In 2003, the birthrate in the region stood at 9.2 children per 1,000 people and the death rate at 24.1 per 1,000.

“This is our tragedy: So many people are dying and so few are being born,” explained the head of the local State Statistics Committee, Lyudmila Titova. “This high rate of mortality is not natural. People have been traumatized, so we have suicides, alcoholism, accidents. … The economic reforms, the change to a market economy, have caused so much unemployment that people have nowhere to work, no meaning to their lives, no reason to live.”

Authorities seem at a loss for how to deal with the crisis. At a conference on the issue last October, President Putin said the crisis was the result of “economic decline, the degradation of the social sphere, low living standards, and alienation.” Mr. Putin, who has set a target of doubling Russian GDP by 2013, said economic growth will stem the decline. The Patriarch of Russia’s Orthodox Church, Alexei II, blamed “the spiritual sickness of the nation and neglect for moral values.” He called on Russians not to reject “the gift of child-bearing” in favor of “luxury and permissiveness.”

Regional governments have started offering financial incentives for Russians to have larger families. In Moscow, for example, parents under 30 receive one-off payments of $570 for their first and second children, and $1,145 for having a third child.

But experts say the incentives are making little difference and the only solution lies in boosting immigration.

“Immigration is the only hope for the future of our country,” Mr. Vishnevsky said. “If we can accept as a society that we need levels of immigration like those in the United States and Canada, we can stabilize or lower the population decline.”

Mr. Vishnevsky isn’t optimistic. He said the country needs to attract up to 700,000 immigrants a year just to keep the population stable. In the last 15 years, the number of immigrants has averaged half that amount and most of those were Russians returning from former Soviet republics. That pool of potential immigrants is fast drying out and the government has no program in place to attract more.

“There is an irrational fear of immigrants in our country,” he said. “While our government formally understands the necessity of immigration, it also knows it would be very unpopular.”

Mr. Vishnevsky said that while many developed countries are struggling to deal with falling populations, the problem is especially acute in Russia because of the rate of decline and the country’s vast territory. Huge swathes of Siberia, already sparsely populated, could be all but empty by mid-century, he said.

“This is a very dangerous situation, not only for Russia but for global stability,” he said. “We have vast territory and very overpopulated neighbors, not only China, but Pakistan, India, Bangladesh; even Iran will be more populated than Russia by 2050. … I don’t want to be a Cassandra and predict that China is going to invade Siberia, but you cannot exclude the possibility. Imagine how that would imbalance the situation around the whole world.”