Inna Leykin’s book Caring Like a State is an astute account of the politics of population in post-Soviet Russia. The book is an important contribution to the anthropology of scientific expertise and the state, arguing that the demographic crisis is entwined with a crisis of state care and exploring the relation between biopolitical and relational forms of care. It is highly relevant at a time when concerns about demographic processes of fertility, mortality, and migration are implicated in the rise of pronatalism, nativism, authoritarianism, and imperialism around the world.
The ethnography is based on two years of fieldwork over the course of a decade (2007–18) in Ekaterinburg, an industrial city in the Ural Mountains. Leykin spent a year (2009–10) at a social scientific research institute, where scholars produced and disseminated demographic knowledge. In addition, she spent time with members of a local NGO educating university students about family and with twenty women between the ages of twenty-three and fifty-five.
The book is organized into five chapters. The first provides historical context for the study of population (nauka o narodonaselenii), or demography, in Russia. During Soviet times demographic processes were understood as derivative of economic modes of production. Soviet demography was positioned against western demography which stressed universal, autonomous Malthusian processes and, later, the theory of demographic transition from high mortality and fertility to low mortality and fertility. The rift began to close in the 1960s and 70s as the USSR joined the US and other states in developing global family planning programs. Russian demographers began to understand population processes, particularly fertility, as related to social values and behavior. This reframing culminated in comprehensive pronatalist policies in 1981, despite continued debate about state intervention. The post-Soviet “demographic crisis”—high mortality with low fertility—heightened the stakes of intervention and, in 2007, the Russian state implemented the Maternity Capital policy which paid women who gave birth to a second or subsequent child.
The second and third chapters introduce the everyday world of the Ekaterinburg research institute. Leykin focuses on the “double-edged nature” (56) of population knowledge as subject to state suppression and support. Scholars negotiated the porous boundary between demography as tool of the state and as autonomous scientific discipline by enacting their authority and debating the difference between basic and applied research. In the third chapter, Leykin follows the scholars as they train state bureaucrats in demography. Here expertise and authority are enacted against the ignorance of bureaucrats using visualizations, the rhetoric of demographic crisis, and predictions of doom. Scholars vernacularized demography, contributing to state language and policy around population. For example, they focused training on fertility and avoided migration, a politically charged subject.
In the fourth chapter, Leykin traces the moralization of population and fertility as spiritual (dukhovnye) problems linked to western values and imperialism. The local state-approved NGO, Semʹia XXI-veka (21st Century Family) trained university students in traditional family values (traditsionnye semeinye tsennosti) and intergenerational continuity (preemstvennostʹ pokolenii), stressing the importance of morally upright families. Thus, NGOs in Vladimir Putin’s Russia participate in the state’s efforts to regulate sexuality, reproduction, and family and enshrine the patriarchal and heterosexual family as a spiritual and moral response to external threat. The last chapter covers women’s strategies of privatized kinship care in the context of state marketized pronatalism without adequate public childcare. As in Soviet times, women rely on grandmothers and housing swaps to make childcare arrangements, but now in a neoliberal context where these strategies are more difficult.
The conclusion functions as an epilogue, addressing the invasion and war in Ukraine as a brutal form of state care enabled by the long-standing depoliticization of citizenship in Russia. This chapter introduces recent developments and observations that present possibilities for deeper analysis. For example, the 2024 censorship of mortality data and the intensification of rhetoric on the demographic crisis (that is, Russia dying out) suggest that the state-demography relations explored in the first chapters fluctuate and that the autonomy of science is fragile. The war in Ukraine invites analysis of the Russian state’s role in men’s mortality and the relationship between that role and the state’s strategies of pronatalism, territorial expansion, and reeducation of Ukrainian children.
Caring Like a State contributes to political anthropology and the anthropology of state, policy, science, expertise, reproduction, and care. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of postsocialism, authoritarianism, demography, and public health. It is appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.
