Russia’s ‘weird’ campaign to boost its birth rate

Russia’s demographic decline, turbocharged by the war in Ukraine, has given birth to “one of the world’s most extreme natalism campaigns”, said The Atlantic.

The country’s fertility rate was 1.4 births per woman in 2023, according to the most recent UN statistics. That’s well below the 2.1 replacement rate and 20% lower than in 2015. And since then, an estimated quarter of a million Russian men have been killed in Ukraine. “Last year, deaths outpaced births by more than half a million.”

The state has been trying everything to encourage Russian women to have more children, from awarding pregnancy payouts and increasing maternal support to restricting access to abortions and stigmatising childlessness. The Ministry of Education is considering ways to create “conditions for romantic relations” in schools, and pink banners around Moscow ask women: “Still haven’t given birth?”

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But, said The Atlantic, “if this is supposed to make them want to procreate, it doesn’t seem to be working”.

‘Much-diminished pool’

For more than 25 years, Vladimir Putin has been grappling with “his country’s declining and ageing population”, said The Independent. Russia actually recorded its lowest birth rate in 1999, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The birth rate was growing, along with the country’s “economic prosperity”, at the start of this century. And then, after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, its federal statistics service started including the peninsula’s population in its data, too. But now “those hard-won gains are crumbling against a backdrop of financial uncertainty, the war in Ukraine, an exodus of young men, and opposition to immigration”.

Russia is trying new restrictions to halt the backslide, from banning the promotion of abortion and “child-free ideology” to outlawing LGBTQ activism. But the post-Soviet cohort is already small, and hundreds of thousands of men have either been killed in Ukraine or have fled abroad to avoid military service. “You’ve got a much-diminished pool of potential fathers in a diminished pool of potential mothers,” Jenny Mathers, a Russian politics lecturer at the University of Aberystwyth told The Independent.

Russia also handled the Covid-19 pandemic disastrously. “Or rather, we didn’t handle it at all,” a demographer told exiled Russian journalists, said Meduza. “Russia ended up among the top 10 countries in the world for excess mortality.”

‘Madcap plan’

“In a sign of how seriously the Kremlin views Russia’s demographic crisis,” Putin recently addressed the inaugural meeting of a demographic council, said Novaya Gazeta. “Families with three or more children should become the norm, the natural way of life in our country,” the president said.

The deputy prime minister announced a new federal register that will allow authorities to track pregnant women and “monitor the demographic situation”.

One Russian politician has even suggested that couples should be barred from social media at night to encourage them to have sex, said The Mirror. Regional MP Mikhail Ivanov’s “madcap plan” for “digital abstinence” would see the Russian state switch off access to social media from 11pm to 2am every night.

Despite all of this, the Kremlin’s own polling suggests that almost 40% of Russian women of childbearing age don’t plan to have children in the next five years, said The Atlantic. And “none of these interventions addresses an underlying reason” why Russian women don’t want children: the war in Ukraine. “Many women are depressed, lonely, and afraid. Every day, the war makes more of them widows.”

Putin’s biggest problem “won’t be solved” by incentivising pregnancy. “He’s created a society that Russians no longer want to bring children into.”