New funeral and burial service companies are opening in Russia at a record pace, and the explanation industry insiders are offering for that growth deserves a skeptical read.
Kommersant reported that 995 funeral and burial service companies and sole proprietors registered in Russia between January and June, a 22.5% year-on-year increase and the fastest half-year growth in five years, citing data from Rusprofile. That builds on an even sharper 37.5% jump in the first quarter alone, suggesting the pace has cooled as the year has gone on.
By the end of June, 11,500 funeral-sector organizations were active across the country, up 7.6% from a year earlier, with sole proprietors making up 81% of active players. Revenue across the sector hit 128.3 billion rubles for 2025, an 18% jump over 2024’s 108.3 billion, and Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service, which published an analysis of the sector in April, puts genuine revenue above 250 billion rubles once black-market activity is included — a sum only slightly behind Polyus, Russia’s top gold producer.
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Kommersant’s own sourcing attributes the surge mainly to deregulation and the splintering of existing businesses rather than rising demand.
Anton Orlov of the Institute for Social Policy Research pointed to funeral agents who’d operated for years off the books being pushed to formalize so they could accept card payments and collect state reimbursements. Denis Tverskoy of Strategy Partners tied it to a tax change — Russia lowered the revenue threshold for VAT exemption from 60 million to 20 million rubles this year, part of a broader overhaul that also raised the standard VAT rate to 22% in January, and he said businesses that once ran on two or three agents are now splitting into multiple sole proprietorships to stay under the new cap.
Notably, none of the sources addressed the war as a possible factor.
The same report also notes that customers are increasingly choosing the cheapest packages available.
Whatever the mix of causes behind the activity in the funeral industry, the underlying death toll is independently documented. Russia’s health ministry put deaths at 916,000 for the first half of 2025, nearly matching pre-pandemic 2019 levels in raw terms, though the mortality rate itself is now higher given Russia’s shrinking population.
A demographer told The Insider the death rate reached 13.1 per 1,000 residents in early 2025, versus 12.6 in 2019, attributing most of the rise to the war. Western estimates place total Russian battlefield casualties, killed and wounded combined, at close to a million as of mid-2025.
Verifying the full scale of that toll has gotten harder. Rosstat began withholding regional and cause-of-death breakdowns in 2025 and later stopped releasing most monthly demographic figures altogether, removing data researchers had previously used to estimate war casualties.
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The Institute for the Study of War has tied the blackout to Kremlin efforts to obscure the military’s personnel losses, and independent demographers say Russia hasn’t withheld this much demographic information since the late Soviet era.
