Far Fewer Russian Women Childless than Moscow Thinks Because of Shortcomings in Last Census, ‘To Be Exact’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 24 – The shortcomings of the last Russian census continue to cast a dark shadow on that country. Many Russians who support banning abortions and childfree to boost the birthrate do so because they believe that, judging from the 2020/21 census returns, 10 percent of Russian women aged 45 to 50 do not have children.

            While the most thoughtful of them recognize that most of those women in fact want children but have not had them either because they couldn’t for physical reasons or because of poverty and other negative life chances, they and many in the West who pick up on their reporting accept the 10 percent figure.

            But that figure, as the To Be Exact portal demonstrates, is an exaggeration. As the portal notes, the two federal subjects which the census said had the highest share of women between 45 and 50 who reportedly did not have children were Ingushetia with 22 percent and Chechnya with 18 percent.

            Those figures reflect not reality in two republics with Muslim populations and birthrates far higher than the Russian Federation as a whole but the reality that census takers there did not contact people there but instead filled in the census forms and often left the children line black because they had no way of knowing that.           

            The result was an overreporting of the percentage of women without children in that age cohort, an error that affects the overall figure on the share in the country as a whole but also highlights why the 2020/21 census may be the most unreliable census in Russian history with the possible exception of Stalin’s 1939 enumeration and should be used only with extreme caution.