Birthrate Falling Not from Infertility, the War, or the Coronavirus but Because Russians Don’t Want to have Children, Shcheglov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 1 – Some officials are suggesting that infertility among Russians is increasing with a few blaming the pandemic while others continue to say that the current decline is an echo of World War II or the “wild” 1990s, Lev Shcheglov says. But the reason is much simpler: Russians today simply don’t want to have children.

            Russians really are having fewer children, the president of the National Institute for Sexology says; but the reasons being thrown about by politicians and officials are seldom compelling. They don’t reflect serious studies; instead, they reflect a desire to blame someone other than themselves (rosbalt.ru/moscow/2020/11/01/1870841.html).

            Blaming World War II 75 years after it ended or the late Russian president Boris Yeltsin is part of this trend, Shcheglov says, who notes that he is old enough to remember when Soviet officials blamed all problems in the USSR on the survival of remnants of capitalist civilization. Like them, leaders today won’t listen to experts or examine the situation with an open mind.

            They don’t want to recognize that Russians won’t have children unless they want them and they won’t want them if they are uncertain about their own futures and fear that having children will only depress their own standard of living, he argues. Reversing demographic decline requires addressing those economic concerns.

            Half measures like material capital or taxing those who don’t have children won’t work. The first may lead some of the poorest and most marginal groups to have children sooner but not necessarily, and the second, which didn’t work for the Bolsheviks won’t work for Russia today, Shcheglov says.

            The only thing that will work is to improve the economy and the living conditions, including medical care in the first instance, of Russians. Otherwise, they won’t have more children whatever the state, however authoritarian it may be, wants. Only a tiny minority could be forced to have children they don’t want.

            But instead of recognizing this reality, one accepted by all demographers and reproduction specialists, the Russian government is riding its own hobbyhorses, none of which will work but all of which will allow it to suggest that someone other than Moscow is to blame for the decline.

            And that decline is very real: Right now, the Russian fertility rate is about 1.5 children per woman per lifetime, far below the 2.1 needed to keep the population stable. If it remains there because Moscow doesn’t work to boost the economy and the standard of living, there will only be 70 to 75 million Russians in 80 or 90 years.