2 months ago
20
What
Kremlin
wants from Russians now boils down to two things: Men should join the army. Women must have more children.
In recent months, Russian govt has doubled sign-up bonuses for soldiers to over $4,500 and blanketed the airwaves, social media and streets with recruitment ads. At the same time, President Vladimir Putin has decreed that increasing births is a national priority, an effort that entered a newly repressive phase last week with a bill that would outlaw any advocacy for a child-free lifestyle with fines as high as $50,000.
The two campaigns are separate, but in wartime Russia, they are two sides of the same coin: Kremlin's increasingly aggressive attempt to enlist Russians in reshaping the country to prevail over the West.
For the short term, Putin's army needs more soldiers. It is suffering 1,000 casualties per day, by Western estimates, in a war of attrition in Ukraine that shows no sign of ending.
And for the long term, in Putin's view, Russia needs more people - to underpin an economy increasingly isolated from the West, to reduce its reliance on immigration, and, of course, to provide the recruitment pool for future wars. "The body is turning into a public good" in Russia, said Andrey Makarychev, a professor at University of Tartu who studies the relationship between the state and people's bodies. "A woman's body is a producer of children, and a man's is the ability to pull the trigger and, in the end, to kill."
Last month, Putin ordered the military to be increased by 180,000 members to 1.5 million - a number that would make it the second-largest after China's, and which analysts say is unrealistic. Govt tied the increase to the "number of threats that exist for our country."
At a conference in Vladivostok last month, Putin praised "our men" for signing up for the military in "exponentially" increasing numbers. But when it came to birthrates, he saw some room for improvement. "It is necessary to take care of the population, to increase the fertility rate," he said, "to make it fashionable to have many children, as it used to be in Russia in the past - seven, nine, 10 people in families." As it has with
military recruitment
, Kremlin is using financial rewards to incentivise births. Women having their first child get a one-time payout of $6,700.
Economists and demographers have long highlighted Russia's shrinking population as a major challenge. In large part it's a legacy of the collapse in the birthrate amid the chaos and poverty that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union; a generation later, there are far fewer women of childbearing age.
In May, Putin declared a key govt goal to be the increase of Russia's total fertility rate, setting targets of 1.6 in 2030 and 1.8 in 2036. The rate was 1.4 last year. The number of children born in Russia in the first half of this year, 599,630, was the lowest in a quarter century; overall, including occupied Crimea, the population has declined by 1.8 million since 2020 to 146.1 million.
