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Putin just turned 74. Russia’s State Duma isn’t getting any younger either. Here’s how the country’s parliament has aged over the past three decades.

Source: Meduza

In late September 2026, after reviewing the results of elections to the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, Russia’s Central Election Commission chief Ella Pamfilova said:

To support her claim, Pamfilova cited the lawmakers’ average age at the end of the previous session and the start of the new Duma: 57 and 53, respectively.

That comparison is incorrect, however. The newly elected lawmakers are indeed younger on average than those who served during the spring sitting of the eighth, outgoing session.

Comparing lawmakers’ ages at the start of each session shows the State Duma has been steadily aging, according to Meduza’s calculations. BBC Russia reached the same conclusion.

The State Duma’s first session was elected in December 1993, and lawmakers convened for their first meeting in January 1994, when their average age was 45.8. By the second session, the average age had risen to 47.2.

In the fifth session, which began work in 2007, the average age exceeded 50 for the first time.

Since then, the average age has continued to rise, reaching 54.3 in the ninth session. The difference from the first session is 8.5 years.

Each successive session is older than the last

Nearly one in three lawmakers in the new Duma has already turned 60. United Russia has the most lawmakers in that group: 109, out of 349 seats the party won overall.

United Russia’s lawmakers age 60 and older alone outnumber all lawmakers from every other party combined: only 101 lawmakers in total were elected to the rest of the Duma, including members of Russia’s Communist Party (KPRF), New People, the LDPR, A Just Russia, and Rodina, along with four independent candidates.

Almost a quarter of the Duma’s lawmakers — 106 of 450 — have already reached retirement age (currently 64 for men and 59 for women); 81 of them were elected from United Russia.

Lawmakers’ average age depends directly on the Duma’s oldest members: the older they are, the higher the overall figure. To rule out the possibility that a few outliers are driving the increase, Meduza also calculated the median age.

In the first session, the median age was 45.3: half the lawmakers were younger, half older. In the current session, it is 54.2, a difference of almost nine years.

This means aging has affected every age segment of the Duma, though the trend has not been uniform: in 2011, for example, the median age dipped slightly.

The change is visible even without averages. In 1994, 127 lawmakers under 40 were elected to the Duma’s first session, almost a third of the original lineup that convened for its first meeting. In the new Duma, only 51 lawmakers are under 40, or one in nine.

There are now almost as many lawmakers age 70 and older: 49. Just 10 years ago, at the start of the seventh session, there were only 19, and in the Duma’s first session there were none at all.

The record for age at the start of a session had previously belonged to KPRF member Vladimir Dolgikh, who was 87 when the sixth Duma began work in December 2011. In the ninth session, United Russia’s Vladimir Resin broke that record; he turned 90 in February.

Before being elected to the State Duma, Resin spent many years heading Moscow’s construction sector and served as first deputy mayor of Moscow under Yuri Luzhkov. LDPR leader Leonid Slutsky likely owes his career to Resin: in private conversations, he calls Resin “Dad.”

The Duma’s oldest lawmaker has a special duty: under the Constitution, he is the one who opens the first meeting of a new Duma. In January 1994, LDPR lawmaker Georgy Lukava opened the first session at age 68. This year, 90-year-old Resin ceded the right to open the meeting to his United Russia colleague, 79-year-old Yuri Petrov.

Petrov is actually only fourth by age: older than the United Russia member are his party colleague Valentina Tereshkova, 89, and KPRF member Gennady Zyuganov, 82. During his remarks, Petrov asked each of his older colleagues in turn, “Shall we open the meeting?” All three agreed, after which Petrov thanked them “for the trust placed in him,” the Russian business daily Kommersant wrote.

The youngest lawmaker in the new Duma is Georgy Arapov, the former head of New People’s regional branch in Irkutsk region, who turned 27 in September.

Arapov has set the lower end of the age range for elected lawmakers over the past five years: he was also the youngest lawmaker in the previous Duma, when the New People member was only 22.

The record for this metric, however, belongs to 21-year-old Vasily Vlasov, elected to the seventh session of parliament from the LDPR in 2016. Before his election, he worked as an aide to Vladimir Zhirinovsky and headed his secretariat. In March 2021, when Vlasov was 25, he became first deputy head of the LDPR faction. In November 2023, a year and a half after Zhirinovsky’s death, Vlasov lost his parliamentary mandate over absences from meetings.

More than three-quarters of pension-age lawmakers were elected from United Russia

Almost a quarter of the new Duma’s lawmakers — 106 of 450 — are already old enough to retire. A large share of them belong to United Russia.

The KPRF has 16 pension-age lawmakers out of 37 in the faction, A Just Russia has five out of 17, the LDPR has two out of 24, and Rodina has one. New People has none.

A total of 109 United Russia lawmakers are starting their work at 60 or older, compared with 35 in the other parties combined.

Despite the increase in the retirement age, United Russia now has more pension-age lawmakers in the new Duma than before: 81, up from 75. The other factions now have fewer: 25, down from 36 in the previous session.

Over the past three sessions, the share of seats held by lawmakers age 60 and older has grown from 26.9% to 32%. The number of lawmakers in that age group was 121 in 2016, 126 in 2021, and is 144 now.

The number of pension-age lawmakers in the Duma as a whole has fallen. Ten years ago, almost one in three lawmakers fell into this group. Now, about one in four do. The decline, however, is directly tied to the increase in the retirement age — under the pre-reform rules, more than a third of the Duma would now fall into this group.

This last change is particularly telling. Compared with the start of the previous session, the number of lawmakers age 60 and older across the whole Duma has grown by 18. All of that increase came from United Russia, which gained 23 lawmakers over 60. In the other parties, the number is actually five lower.

In 2016, only 19 lawmakers had already turned 70. By 2021, there were 33, and in the current session there are 49, or one in 10. Of these, 34 are United Russia members, 11 were elected from the KPRF, two from A Just Russia, one from the LDPR, and one ran as an independent candidate.

Despite their age, many remain politically active, supporting Putin and the war in Ukraine.

For example, 82-year-old KPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov and his party colleague, 78-year-old Vladimir Kashin, are involved in organizing supplies for the Russian military. In August 2026, the KPRF announced that the two had helped send another convoy to the combat zone. According to the party, along with food and medicine for soldiers, the communists sent drones, thermal imaging devices, camouflage netting, SUVs, and motorcycles.

A Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov is now 73. In January 2023, he received a sledgehammer bearing the insignia of the Russian mercenary group Wagner as a gift from Yevgeny Prigozhin. Wagner mercenaries used a sledgehammer to kill their own comrade at the front, former convict Yevgeny Nuzhin. Even after Prigozhin’s march on Moscow and his death in a plane crash, Mironov said he would keep the gift “in a place of honor” as “a sign of fellowship.”

However, since late August 2026, Mironov has stopped attending party events in person. He said he is being treated for an injury sustained during a trip to Altai. His fellow party members stood in for him during the pre-election debates. Nevertheless, on September 28, Mironov was unanimously reelected as faction leader. He joined the meeting via video link and said he would continue working remotely for now.

The Kremlin openly uses the standing of other experienced lawmakers for its own purposes. For example, in March 2020, Valentina Tereshkova proposed a constitutional amendment allowing Putin to run for president again. She was 83 at the time and is starting the new Duma at 89.

A source in the State Duma told Meduza that Tereshkova’s remarks had been written in the Kremlin. Kommersant wrote that the amendment had been drafted in advance, with Tereshkova’s name added by hand. A source who spoke to Kommersant, close to Russia’s Presidential Administration, said Tereshkova was close to State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin.

After Tereshkova’s remarks, Volodin called on all factions to defend her from criticism: “The attacks being made on Tereshkova today are attacks on our country.”

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New People remains the youngest party. But it’s aging too

The youngest faction, as in the previous session, is New People. Founded in 2020, this was the party’s second electoral cycle, but it, too, has aged in the meantime: the average age of a faction lawmaker was 39.9 in 2021 and is 42 in the current session.

At the same time, the party’s makeup in parliament has changed. The nine lawmakers elected to the Duma for the first time are noticeably younger than their more experienced colleagues: the newcomers average 39.7, compared with 43.8 for the others.

The oldest faction in the new Duma is the KPRF, whose lawmakers average 61.5 years old. The faction has aged by 11.3 years since the first session, though there have been periods in the KPRF’s history when it got younger — after the 2021 election, for example, the average age of the communists fell, though it remained higher than in 1994, when it was 50.2.

Right now, 37 communists have been elected to the Duma. Eleven of them have already turned 70, and another eight have turned 60.

There is only one communist lawmaker under 40: 38-year-old Alexander Ivachev of the Sverdlovsk region. He heads the region’s party branch and previously served as deputy speaker of the regional legislative assembly. Ivachev is known, among other things, for his statements against the Yeltsin Center and his fight to preserve a bas-relief of Stalin on the Officers’ House building in Yekaterinburg, calling the arguments of those who wanted it removed “the sick fantasies of ‘victims of repression.’”

The LDPR faction has aged by 8.2 years over the past 10 years, the largest increase among the four parties represented in the last three sessions. This trend only emerged in recent years — the LDPR used to be one of the youngest parties. In 2000, lawmakers elected from the Zhirinovsky Bloc began their work with an average age of about 40.

A Just Russia lawmakers have gotten an average of 10 years older over five sessions: the figure was 49 in 2007 and is now 59.1.

United Russia’s average age, 54.1, is lower than that of the KPRF and A Just Russia. Within the party, the share of members age 60 and older rose from 26% at the start of the previous session to 31% in the current one.

Some lawmakers have aged along with the Duma. Three of them have voted on bills for almost 33 years in a row.

More than half the lawmakers in the current Duma — 269 of 450 — also served in the previous session, and 143 took part in all three of the last sessions.

A total of 172 people received a Duma mandate for the first time in 2026. About one in eight of them, 21 lawmakers, have already reached retirement age, roughly the same share as five years ago. The average age of newcomers has not changed since the start of the previous session, either: it is about 48.

Overall, lawmakers entering the Duma for the first time are younger than their experienced colleagues, but the incoming generation that has already made it into parliament is not getting any younger from one election to the next.

Not all newcomers, though, help make the Duma younger. For example, former minister and current adviser to the head of Bashkortostan Gennady Bukayev ran for the State Duma for the first time this year. He had turned 79 by the start of the new Duma’s work.

And some of those who received their first mandate already at retirement age have since spent five or 10 years in parliament. United Russia lawmaker Galina Danchikova came to the Duma in 2016, at 62, and is now starting her third session at 72. Her fellow party member Nikolai Doluda became a lawmaker for the first time in 2021, at 69, and had turned 74 by the start of his second session.

Three lawmakers in the current Duma were part of the starting lineup in all nine sessions, including the very first: KPRF member Gennady Zyuganov, his party colleague Nikolai Kharitonov, and A Just Russia member Anatoly Greshnevikov. In 1994, they were 49, 45, and 37, respectively. Now they are 82, 77, and 70.

The Duma’s age makeup does not closely reflect Russia’s population. The most noticeable gap is the shortage of lawmakers under 40: more than a third of Russia’s adult population is under 40, but in the new Duma, only one in nine seats went to a lawmaker that age. Nationwide, there are three times as many people ages 18 to 40 as there are lawmakers in that age group: 35.1% versus 11.3%.

Lawmakers ages 40 to 64 hold more than two-thirds of the seats, even though they make up less than half of the country’s adult population. The share of people 65 and older is nearly the same in parliament and among the population overall, about one in five.

In the new State Duma, 11% of lawmakers are under 40. In Germany’s Bundestag, after the 2025 election, the figure was 28%, and in France’s National Assembly, after the 2024 election, it was 25%. The U.S. House of Representatives, however, had even fewer young lawmakers than Russia at the start of 2025 — only about 8%.

By the end of the ninth session, the average age of State Duma lawmakers is projected to reach 59.3.