2024-09-27 02:25:52
The Kremlin is trying to reverse the demographic disaster. The war in Ukraine has virtually ensured that Russia will be not only smaller, but also older, more vulnerable and less educated in the coming generations. The head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, therefore ordered several measures to be taken to encourage women to bear as many children as possible.
Russia’s population is plummeting, and Kremlin officials are desperate to stem the declining birth rate. In recent months, the panic has become more and more noticeable. According to data from the state statistics agency Rosstat, 599,600 children were born in Russia in the first half of 2024, which is 16 thousand less than in the same period in 2023 and is the lowest number since 1999.
Speaking at the Eurasian Women’s Forum in St. Petersburg last Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly emphasized government policies to help women balance professional success with a large family. He added with a smile that Russian women can do it easily while remaining “beautiful, delicate and charming”.
Women hear messages about how to prioritize raising children over education and career everywhere – on television, radio, newspapers or in Putin’s public speeches. At the same time, due to the war in Ukraine, launched by Russia in February 2022, more and more men are disappearing from the labor market, creating a critical labor shortage.
Yevgeny Šestopalov, the head of the health department of Russia’s Primorye region, even recently called on citizens to have sex during their lunch breaks at work. Life goes by fast, he says, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t.
Award for many children
The Russian authorities also make no secret of the fact that they want women to start giving birth to children at the age of eighteen. According to them, the best couples are those who had a child during their studies and who then spend their whole lives together.
“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven or eight children, maybe more. We should restore these wonderful traditions,” Putin told an audience of ultra-conservative religious and political figures at the State Kremlin Palace last November.
Since then, he has implemented several measures. For example, he restored the old Soviet Heroic Mother award of 1944 for women who have 10 or more children, as well as the Order of Parental Glory. Most recently, on May 30, he held a video conference in the Kremlin with nine large families who received these awards. According to him, ensuring that Russians have as many children as possible is a fundamental goal of Russian state policy.
The head of the Kremlin also restricted access to abortions, which the Soviet Union legalized back in 1920. On the contrary, he pushed for more funding for organizations that promote traditional family values and try to prevent divorce.
Marianna Muravyeva, a professor of Russian law and administration at the University of Helsinki, considers Putin’s practices very dangerous. “They practically force women to return to tradition and values from the Middle Ages. In the Kremlin’s view, the traditional family is one where women basically just give birth, work and are abused in a strongly patriarchal model,” she explains to The Washington Post.
Re-education of kidnapped children
At the beginning of last week, women in Moscow between the ages of 18 and 40 even started receiving invitations for fertility tests as part of the new program. They are to appear for an examination that will measure the level of the so-called anti-Müllerian hormone in the blood. It shows how many healthy immature eggs a woman has. If the tests reveal that there are not enough, the state will offer women, for example, the option of having some of their eggs frozen.
“It makes me feel that the state is violating my boundaries and forcing me to do something that I should decide for myself. The topic of family planning is already such a sensitive one… the media regularly calls on Russian women to give up their careers and have children and openly condemns those who don’t put family first,” wrote one of the women who received an invitation to the aforementioned testing to the CBC station.
Newly, only women who have at least five children and embody the so-called traditional image of a Russian woman will be promoted at work. It is constantly broadcast by the local state television. “A woman cooks at home, takes care of the children, while her man is at the front. She waits patiently for him, and if it happens that he falls in the war, she is proud and takes it as a sacrifice for the country she loves. She only goes to work out of duty , he has no ambitions,” David Herszenhorn, a journalist for The Washington Post, who spent several years in Moscow as a correspondent, describes to Aktuálně.cz.
Women who meet all these requirements and have already given birth to several children have the opportunity to advance to higher positions. “For example, like the Russian commissioner for children’s rights, Marija Lvovová-Bělovová, who has ten children, five of whom are adopted, and has worked her way up to the position of Putin’s leading adviser,” adds the journalist, adding that she is accused, together with the head of the Kremlin, of kidnapping Ukrainian children.
The reporter believes that he would not be surprised if the abduction of children was also some desperate way to fill the hole in the birth rate. “Putin kidnaps children and then re-educates them in his own image in correctional camps. It all fits together,” concludes Herszenhorn.
Czechs also participate in rescuing kidnapped children from Russia. The Paraborn organization seeks their return back to Ukraine. Anyone can help, for example by becoming an official patron of a child. “We cannot forget the abducted children from Ukraine under any circumstances. The West must not allow this to happen. Our goal must be nothing other than the successful return of each of them back home,” says founder and doctor Václav Jordán.
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Spotlight Aktuálně.cz – Petra Procházková | Video: Team Spotlight