Putin’s ‘Hero Mother’ Program Highlights Russia’s Demographic Problems Rather than Solving Them

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 29 – In 2022, Vladimir Putin restored the Soviet practice of awarding mothers with ten or more children the title of Hero Mother and paid each woman so identified a price of one million rubles, something that he clearly expected would lead women across the country to have more children and help Russia compensate for losses in his war in Ukraine

            (For background on this award that some Russian deputies have long called for and Putin’s expectations about its impact, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/06/putin-wants-to-restore-hero-mother.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/07/seventy-five-years-ago-today-moscow.html.)

             But things have not worked out as Putin intended. On the one hand, fertility rates especially in predominantly ethnic Russian cities have continued to fall. And on the other, the women most likely to have ten or more children and qualify for the award are women from Muslim nations in the Caucasus, hardly the pattern Putin wants to see.

            But in order to keep the award going and to suggest that there are at least some women who have given birth to and are raising ten or more children, Putin has had not choice but to give Hero Mother awards to women from those nationalities, even though it calls attention to Russia’s demographic problems rather than serving as a means to solve them.

            This week, for example, Putin named three new hero mothers. All three are from the Muslim republics of the North Caucasus. As has been largely true in the past, he did not find any Orthodox Russians to qualify, something that he almost certainly would have liked to be able to do (etokavkaz.ru/news/247394).