Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 18 – The “traditional”
family that Vladimir Putin and Russian nationalist want in which couples marry
early and have three or four children is in fact becoming more numerous in the Russian
Federation, but that comeback may not please everyone because most such
families are either in villages or in traditionally Muslim ones.
Urban Russians continue to behave
more like their European counterparts, marrying later and having fewer or even
no children. As a result, villagers will
continue to increase at more rapid rates than urban residents, and Muslim
regions and many non-Russian regions will grow relative to Russian ones, thus
shifting the ethnic balance in the country still further.
Using unpublished Rosstat data,
Sergey Zakharov, the deputy director of the Institute of Demography at Moscow’s
Higher School of Economics, focused on the transformation of the Russian family
with the urban one going in one direction and the rural and non-Russian one
going in quite another (opec.ru/1893286.html).
Examining statistics for the Russian
Federation as a whole, he says, shows that “on the one hand, the number of
childless women is growing” and approaching 15 percent, the level in most
developed countries but “on the other hand, a segment of Russian families
measured by number of children and the speed of forming a family is moving in
the opposite direction,” with more children born and over a shorter period of
time.
If one looks at the first, one would
conclude that Russia is completing its second “demographic revolution;” but if
one considers the second, it would appear that Russia is making “a step
backward” in that regard. Zakharov used
by longitudinal and regional data to consider which trend may win out.
Birthrates in the country as a whole
have been falling more or less constantly since the 1920s, with each following
generation having on average fewer children than its predecessor. That leads
some to “pessimistic” conclusions. But in the last two years, the fertility rates
for women in many rural and non-Russian areas of Russia have been “above 2.7.”
That figure is far above the
replacement level of 2.1 children per
woman per lifetime that is needed – and also far above the figure for Russia as
a whole which in 2014 was 1.75 children per woman per lifetime. The explanation is that figures in urban areas
and among ethnic Russians were much lower than that, well below replacement
rates.
The number of multi-child families
is also growing, Zakharov says, with about 20 percent of younger women having
three children and 10 percent having four. But at the same time, the share of
women having two children has remained over the last 40 year largely unchanged
at 40 percent, although the share of those with one has fallen over that
period.
At the end of Soviet times and in
the first decades of Russian ones, the age at which women gave birth to their
first children fell dramatically but now that decline has stopped overall, a
reflection of moves in the other direction among rural Russians and non-Russian
nationalities.
There is thus an increasing gap
between city and countryside in Russia, reversing an earlier trend toward its
reduction, and “territorial variations in rural areas ‘exceed the level of the end
of the 1970s and even the level of the 1950s,’” Zakharov says, with non-Russian
ones having far higher fertility rates than Russian ones.
The growth in the number of women
having three of four children is found largely in rural areas and especially in
non-Russian republics and among non-Russians more generally who had high levels
of fertility in the past and have not yet “completed the demographic transition
to lower fertility.”
Pro-natalist policies are having some
effect, he suggested. In 2013, the only groups showing an increase in birth
were in families where at least one parent was a non-Russian. In 2014, these
groups, who are far outnumbered by ethnic Russians, accounted for only 30
percent of the increase. But clearly most of the rise came in rural areas, not
Russian cities.
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