In contemporary Russia, demography has become a staple of general conversation, televised debates, and political operations. Moral panic over “the demographic crisis” erupted in 2006, when in his annual address to the Federal Assembly President Vladimir Putin identified Russia's declining population as a major threat and the country's most pressing problem. In 2006, total fertility rates were well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman and on par with the birthrates of other (both eastern and western) European countries. Unlike other European countries, however, Russia has had relatively high mortality rates and an unbalanced life expectancy at birth for women and men. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, low fertility rates accompanied by high mortality rates have led to rapid negative population growth, and although demographic trends have been gradually improving over the last decade, the number of deaths still exceeds the number of births.Footnote 1
The post-Soviet discourse on the demographic crisis that targets individual reproductive choices and attitudes resonates with a neoliberal political project that attempts to govern populations through the market logic of optimization, individual responsibilization and efficacy.Footnote 2 Yet, the basic categories of the discourse, although evocative of a new neoliberal rationality, do not neatly match the political logic of neoliberalism. In fact, as this article argues, these categories were born of epistemological changes that took place in Soviet population science in the last decades of the USSR. During this period, Soviet demography underwent both institutional and conceptual transformations. The economic determinism characteristic of early Marxist demography gave way to the concept of population governed by its own logic, somewhat independent of socioeconomic processes. A Marxist-Leninist, anti-Malthusian stance was gradually replaced with one that incorporated the Malthusian model of population and focused on the role of social norms and values in determining population structures. This shift saw the concept of demographic behavior (demograficheskoe povedenie)—determined by social norms and cultural attitudes related to childbearing, childrearing, marriage, and health—introduced to the analytic vocabulary of the discipline. Demographic research published in scientific journals as well as in the popular press examined how transformations in demographic behavior drive changes in the overall population structure of society. The move to a more behaviorist approach in population research during the late Soviet period further affected the ways in which the Party leadership and administration conceived of the population problem and led to new policy problematizations, which the current, post-Soviet state has inherited.
Through their interactions with local and national administrations as well as in their public engagements, post-Soviet demographers—whose ideals, know-how, and disciplinary structures were formed during that late Soviet period—shape the contemporary discourse on the demographic crisis and affect policy solutions offered by the post-Soviet state. The article follows these conceptual developments, showing how knowledge produced by Soviet population science of some forty years ago continues to provide authoritative knowledge affecting post-Soviet governing practices.
Questioning Neoliberalism
Scholars of postsocialism have contributed to ethnographic and historical research on what Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore have aptly referred to as “actually existing neoliberalism.”Footnote 3 Highlighting the moments of resonance between socialist and neoliberal regimes, these scholars have argued that postsocialist social and economic reforms and new practices of self-fashioning cannot be reduced to the introduction of neoliberal ideologies and ought to be considered in conjunction with socialist forms of sociality and practices of individualization.Footnote 4 They have emphasized the embeddedness of post-Soviet “shock therapy” in local subjectivities and further shown how these practices of individualization provided a foundation for the regional developments of neoliberal ideologies and supported new post-Soviet “shock therapy” policies.Footnote 5
One attempt to explain the complex relations between socialism and neoliberalism derives from Michel Foucault's conceptualization of neoliberalism as a governing technology, not necessarily conditioned by a specific economic system.Footnote 6 For scholars following this theoretical thread, neoliberalism emerged through internal political developments of socialist societies and was facilitated by the influx of ideas from the outside. Thus, Gil Eyal has demonstrated how Czechoslovak political dissidents, on the one hand, and technocratic elites influenced by imported monetarist economic ideas, on the other, shaped indirect forms of government and governing technologies associated with neoliberalism.Footnote 7 In other words, in Eyal's reading, socialism as a form of government had become neoliberal prior to 1989, although the economic system remained intact until then. Also inspired by Foucault's writings and moving forward in time, Stephen Collier analyzed post-Soviet urban planning policies of the mid-1990s not as a reflection of an emerging neoliberal ideology but rather as a refracted assemblage of the elements of socialist (and deeply illiberal) and neoliberal biopolitical systems. Elements of the Soviet biopolitical system, he showed, were evident in the material and institutional manifestations of new approaches to post-Soviet government. Collier has used his analysis to highlight the inadequacy of the dominant narratives of neoliberalism as a coherent set of ideas, based on binary distinctions of state versus market / public versus private.Footnote 8
Although tackling the socialist roots of neoliberalism from a theoretically different perspective, Johanna Bockman is similarly critical of the perceived coherence of neoliberalism that reinforces the popular dichotomy between socialism (state planning) and capitalism (markets). She has demonstrated how accounts of neoliberalism as a unified doctrine, propagated by right-wing elites and their international capitalist allies, made ideas about the possibility of socialist markets or market socialism appear as neoliberal.Footnote 9 Yet, Bockman's historical scrutiny has shown them as long-held socialist ideas that cannot be detached from the larger socio-economic system, in which they were produced. Effacing the socialist history of these ideas has both reified neoliberalism as an all-encompassing category and reduced socialism to a two-dimensional political model doomed to failure.Footnote 10
Contributing to the scholarly conversation on neoliberalism, this article seeks to further unsettle the perceived unity of neoliberalism as a cohesive set of ideas and practices by unraveling the different forms of knowledge expressed in post-Soviet discourse on the demographic crisis. The categories that shape the discourse on the demographic crisis are not neoliberal, as they were produced from a distinct set of knowledge practices. At the same time, the state discourse on the demographic crisis cannot be properly understood without referring to neoliberalism, which provides an institutional foundation for new population policies. Yet, rather than uncovering the neoliberal (or illiberal) elements of Soviet demographic thought, I am interested in the pervasive flexibility of post-Soviet neoliberalism that repurposes Soviet forms of knowledge in radically diverging social and political contexts. To show this flexibility, the article demonstrates two interrelated processes. First, it shows how Soviet ideas about population problems are manifested in the post-Soviet (and neoliberal) policy reasoning; and second, how, when reproblematized in a new political environment, old theoretical ideas, produced under a different regime, can acquire new political meanings and generate new forms of government.
A Neoliberal Policy?
In Russia, the discourse on the demographic crisis has focused predominantly on fertility as the government's main target. Thus, in 2007, following Putin's alarmist portrayal of the population problem, the government launched a new, monetized pronatalist policy. The policy, referred to as “Maternal Capital,” is essentially a one-time monetary incentive for women to produce a second child. Diverging from previous welfare policy models, “Maternal Capital” pays a lump-sum (approximately $13,000, with a monthly inflation adjustment) to women (married or single) who give birth to a second child after December 31, 2006. With certain exceptions, the money is paid to a woman when her (second) child turns three, and might be spent on three preset purposes stipulated by the state: household mortgage, child's education, and mother's retirement plan.Footnote 11
Although, as Michele Rivkin-Fish has rightly argued, this rhetorically harkens back to some Soviet pronatalist tropes, the discourse on the demographic crisis is also substantiated by a social policy that clearly diverges from previous welfare models.Footnote 12 This difference is particularly pronounced in relation to gender and women's participation in the labor market. The Soviet welfare regime could be described, following Lynne Haney, as “maternalist.”Footnote 13 It defined mothers as objects of welfare and saw them as active participants in the labor market from the early days of the Soviet Union.Footnote 14 Indeed, the stated, although not always realized, goal of Soviet demographic policies was to help women workers reconcile their motherhood with active participation in the labor market.Footnote 15 Thus, childcare services were often built around production and service enterprises (factories, state ministries), which were also responsible for establishing social security funds for their workers to pay them welfare benefits.Footnote 16
The new welfare model marks shifting conceptions of state intervention, characteristic of the new post-Soviet approach to public needs and social support. In the state rhetoric surrounding the current set of demographic policies, and Maternal Capital specifically, the subject of women in the labor market has been replaced with a monetized and individualized incentive to reproduce. Against a recognized wisdom that sees the retreat of the state as one of the main objectives of the neoliberal project, the post-Soviet state has not taken a back seat. It is, rather, that the new policy reasoning effectively limited women's interests to a bureaucratic accounting of individual needs and narrowed the scope of their claims and rights.
This individualized approach to need finds its origins in a governing technology—monetarism—that through monetary representations of social reality aims to shape individuals as autonomous, self-organizing agents. In monetarism, money is thought of as a universal mediator of social relations, with the help of which people should be able to calculate their choices and make rational decisions without the interference of a coercive power.Footnote 17 Indeed, the policy of Maternal Capital coheres with a more general trend of the monetization of social policies in contemporary Russia, in which neoliberal political reasoning promotes market solutions to social ills.Footnote 18
Experts in demography, whom I interviewed during my year-long fieldwork in Russia (2009–10) as part of a larger research project on the politics of the “demographic crisis,” identified themselves as reluctant participants in the monetization of social benefits evident in the “Maternal Capital” policy. Putin's pronouncement about the need for a new pronatalist policy hardly took them by surprise: rumor about it spread fast in the small and tight-knit professional community of Russian demographers, many of whom also served on various federal and regional expert committees dedicated to the issue. Perceiving falling birthrates as the greatest threat to population growth—an argument inherited from Soviet demographic discussions—these demographers advanced the idea that the state should concentrate its efforts on facilitating fertility. Yet, the monetized form of the Maternal Capital policy did indeed catch them unawares. “This idea did not come from us,” I heard again and again.Footnote 19 Their expert opinions were countered, they said, by government officials’ demands to produce a cost-benefit analysis of the demographic situation. A leading demographer from Moscow State University recalled in an interview that a high-ranking official from a ministry in charge of the demographic policies requested that the committee produce a simple economic analysis. Thus, he remembered the official asking: “How many more babies do we need? What is the desirable birthrate? How much money do we need if we decided to pay women to have them? How much would it cost if we paid them directly?”Footnote 20 Another demographer lamented that when preparing a set of policy measures aimed at increasing the country's birthrates, this ministry's officials used economic indicators of efficacy (money spent vs. absolute number of children born) instead of indicators suitable for the demographic analysis of population reproduction.Footnote 21
The demographers I interviewed did not question the state's focus on fertility as a target of intervention, yet they expressed profound disappointment in the new policy and called it “demographically illiterate” (demograficheski bezgramotnaia politika). It was illiterate, they claimed, because policymakers failed to properly conceptualize behavior as a function of demographic processes. Within the professional community of Russian demographers, there are two distinct ways to conceptualize behavior: the first concerns the inertia of demographic processes while the second involves the value-based evaluation of these processes. With respect to the former, patterns of demographic behavior are more durable than state officials tend to believe. Guided by its own set of regulatory rules, demographic behavior is not easily altered by state policies, however generous those may be.Footnote 22 An alternative position, although critical of state policy because of its narrow monetary nature, nevertheless highlights the explicit role of the state in regulating demographic behavior through structural incentives. From this perspective, demographic behavior is seen as more modifiable; changes can be achieved by strengthening the value—both economic and social—of family and reproduction.Footnote 23
In the remaining sections of this article, I trace these two opposing views to the uneven development of Soviet population science and the emergence of demographic behavior as a dominant object of demographic research. After a brief introduction of prewar developments in Soviet demography, I show how the concept of behavior as a driving force in transforming population, that structures the aforementioned views, has been shaped by late Soviet techno-scientific concepts. These concepts, in turn, molded the post-Soviet scientific demographic landscape and contributed to the ways in which the state imagines its population problem. Finally, this article demonstrates how knowledge produced by Soviet population science provokes ideas that gain new institutional power and engender rhetoric that renders individual behavior the core of the demographic problem. In the current political period, these concepts serve as a mechanism for the neoliberal imperative of stabilizing and “responsobilizing” people's behavior.Footnote 24
Political Arithmetic: Demographers and the New Soviet State
Like any other modern polity, the new Soviet state relied heavily on numbers. Its first decade was characterized by what historian Alain Blum has called the period of “statistical enthusiasm.” This period was fueled by statisticians who were trained in the imperial tradition of regional statistical administration (zemstvo) and who shared with the Party leadership a strong technocratic ethos that influenced both Russian imperial and Soviet policies.Footnote 25
Early Soviet conceptualizations of population developed out of the Leninist rejection of Thomas Malthus, whose theory of population growth became the backbone of modern population science in the nineteenth century. Malthus famously argued that the geometric rate of population growth will exceed the arithmetic rate of food production growth and will eventually lead to the doubling of population size every twenty-five years. The logical conclusion to be drawn from the “Malthusian Doctrine” is that overpopulation inevitably causes poverty. Malthus's conceptual endeavor, paired with the life-table construction techniques developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became the methodological backbone of modern states to describe and design populations (regular censuses, reliable pools of demographic data).Footnote 26
Marxist-Leninist population science rejected Malthus's epistemological assumptions that population is a natural phenomenon that is guided, like wealth, by a universal set of laws. It argued instead that overpopulation—Malthus's grim prediction—is not a universal law but rather a form of surplus labor necessary for capitalist expansion.Footnote 27 Lenin referred to Malthusian principles of population as an individualistic ideology that conceals the capitalist nature of exploitation.Footnote 28 Without producing an alternative theory of population, the official ideology of the new Bolshevik state posited modes of production as the ultimate determinant of demographic fluctuations. Thus, in 1935, the head of the statistics division of Gosplan (the State Planning Committee) claimed that fertility rates in the Soviet Union were growing due to improved economic conditions, and that the country's high birthrates compared to other countries in Europe proved the advantage of socialist central planning over capitalism.Footnote 29
The professional community of Soviet demographers did not escape Iosif Stalin's terror, suffering a series of massive political purges beginning in the 1920s.Footnote 30 In the late 1930s, following Stalin's disappointment with the 1937 census, leading statisticians and demographers were executed or imprisoned, demographic institutes shut down, and the Central Statistical Bureau's academic journal Vestnik Statistiki ceased publication. When the 1937 census data began to come in, they clearly contradicted the expectations of the Party leadership and Stalin himself, who had previously announced that the population had grown to 170 million, eight million higher than the census showed. The results were suppressed and Stalin arrested and later purged most of the statisticians involved in the census effort.Footnote 31 At that time, access to population statistics became highly restricted and the professional activities of Soviet demographers who survived the purges were seriously obstructed. In fact, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, demographers and statisticians were routinely denied access to the fruits of their own research, which were labeled as “top secret” or “classified information.”Footnote 32
Political repression did not, however, mean that counting was no longer important to the Soviet state. Counting and studying population served central planning; as such, it remained an enduring characteristic of the Soviet political system. Despite the primacy of Party truth over science asserted by Stalin, both Party officials and scientific experts employed by the state shared a strong belief in the modernizing political project and the importance of statistics for the rational management of the population. Even during the most tragic periods of the Soviet state (famine, wars), authorities in charge of statistical data worked hard to update and improve their methods of collecting and analyzing demographic data.Footnote 33 The Central Statistical Bureau (TsSU) (under its different names throughout history) was subordinated to Gosplan—the Soviet agency responsible for central economic planning. The bureau's mandate was to regulate economic planning through precise population measurement and knowledge produced by experts in demographic statistics, who informed state policies and contributed to Party attempts to manage the population.Footnote 34
The demographers who survived the purges continued to conduct research, although many found themselves torn between their disciplinary approaches and the demands of the Party and Marxist-Leninist ideology.Footnote 35 Such was the case of Mikhail V. Ptukha, the founder and director of the Kiev Institute of Demography, shut down by Stalin in 1938. Despite multiple arrests during the 1930s, he continued his research, although focusing on the safer topic of the history of statistics in the Soviet Union, and participated in preparing the first postwar census.Footnote 36 Aron Ya. Boyarskii, who features prominently in the next section of the article, also survived the purges to become the director of an important research institute in the postwar period. He and Ptukha were a living bridge connecting pre-Stalin demography with new debates about the revival of demography as an independent scientific discipline.
The Late Soviet Science of Population
The political liberalization set off by Khrushchev's “Thaw” brought about a fresh attempt to rethink the Soviet doctrine of population. The first post-war census of 1959 marked the institutional revival of the discipline of demography and a renewed interest in statistics and demographic research as an important tool for planning and managing population.Footnote 37 Scholars striving to resuscitate their discipline portrayed demography as the scientific ground for the new phase of socialist development, helping to correct the failures of Stalin-era policies that lacked empirical foundations.Footnote 38
Along with a general liberalization that affected other social scientific disciplines, two political demands shaped the re-emergence of demography in the postwar period. First, there was a clear need to access the demographic consequences of the war on the national level.Footnote 39 Second, in the context of the Cold War, a stance had to be taken in the debate surrounding interventionist population politics in developing countries, led by the United States. Population science was being used to express opposition to these interventions, which in turn prompted state institutions, in particular the Central Committee, to support the resurgence of the discipline.Footnote 40
In the immediate postwar period, the Soviet state's strong opposition to US intervention in the population politics of developing countries was guided by the economic determinism characteristic of the earlier Soviet population doctrine that perceived population as a function of the relations of production. Soviet representatives at the 1954 World Population Conference in Rome rejected Malthusianism and the notion of population control as an overt justification for capitalist expansion.Footnote 41 Yet, soon after, economic determinism began to fade as an exclusive explanation for population problems. In November 1965, Boris Ts. Urlanis—a demographer, who taught statistics at the Moscow Economic Statistical Institute (MESI), where many future demographers studied, and one of the most revered figures in the Soviet science of population—published an article in Literaturnaia Gazeta, the official journal of the USSR Writers’ Union, in which he questioned the official Soviet position on family planning policies in the developing world taken at the 1965 World Population Conference in Belgrade.Footnote 42 Urlanis and others openly attacked the official line taken by the head of the census department of the Central Statistical Administration, Piotr Pod΄yachikh, which resoundingly rejected any interventionist population policies. Urlanis and his colleagues accused him of narrow economic determinism that did not allow for any discussion of the consequences of demographic trends beyond simple descriptive statements.Footnote 43
In the same period, the Soviet state adjusted its population doctrine and softened its hardline stance on family planning programs in the developing world. Thus, at the 1966 World Health Organization meeting, the Soviet delegation, still asserting its position regarding population growth as the function of the mode of production, nevertheless backed the WHO resolution to provide support for the development of global family planning activities.Footnote 44 Less than a decade later, at the 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest, the Soviet delegation generally supported the US initiative to establish a global strategy focusing on family planning (although disagreeing on the numerical targets). In fact, when the Chinese delegation vehemently opposed the plan and accused the USSR of submitting to the US-backed imperial appetites expressed in its population control campaigns, the Soviet delegates turned to their American counterparts, who led the initiative, and shook their hands.Footnote 45
For Urlanis and his colleagues, these developments, as well as the concern with falling birthrates visible in the European parts of the country, were an opportunity to claim their field of research as an independent scientific discipline that has a great practical utility to central planning.Footnote 46 Indeed, the 1960s became a pivotal period for the institutional revival of the discipline, and for shaping its scope. In 1963, the Central Statistical Bureau (TsSU, GosKomStat from 1987) founded a research institute under the leadership of a surviving prewar demographer, Aron Ya. Boyarskii. In his recollection of this period, the head of the center for demography and labor resources at the Institute, Andrei G. Volkov, remembers the Institute as being at the forefront of “the battle for demography” (bitva za demografiiu).Footnote 47 Despite recurring resistance from the Bureau officials (for instance, Petr Pody΄achikh), the Institute continued to make professional claims of jurisdiction over population issues (mostly against political economists and statisticians).Footnote 48 Boyarskii claimed that, unlike statistics or economics, which have much narrower objects of study, demography takes into account a wide range of factors—economic as well as cultural, ethnic, biological and psychological—that affect population trends.Footnote 49 Still critical of Malthusianism and defending the primacy of economic processes over demographic trends, the Institute under Boyarskii's leadership nevertheless produced a number of leading demographers as well as pioneering works through which new concepts in general and demographic behavior in particular emerged as the cornerstone of demographic research on fertility, family and demographic policy.Footnote 50
The Institute of Applied Social Research, founded in 1968, provided additional institutional basis for revitalizing the discipline. The first director of the Institute, Aleksei M. Rumyantsev, an economist by training, sought to employ sociologists alongside demographers, economists, and political scientists who would conduct social research in different fields. Although Rumyantsev's plan was never fully realized, from its founding until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 the Institute hosted scholars who contributed to the resurgence of demography and who ignited the debates that would later define the field and its further development.Footnote 51
The department of economics at Moscow State University and the Center for the Study of Population Problems under the leadership of Dmitrii Valentei, founder and a longstanding director of the Center, not only produced demographic research on a large scale but also offered the first professional program for training demographers.Footnote 52 Murray Feshbach's report on Soviet demography, which was prepared for the United States Air Force in 1986, showcased the prominent role taken by Valentei and his center.Footnote 53 At least one-third of this brief but highly informative account was dedicated to Valentei and his activities at the center.Footnote 54 According to one of Valentei's colleagues, when the text was translated into Russian and presented at a meeting of the center shortly after its publication, Valentei's achievements greatly impressed his party patrons and may have contributed to the advancement of demography as an instrument of policymaking.Footnote 55
The demographic seminar series at the Moscow Central House of Scientists (TsDU), chaired by Boris Ts. Urlanis, had served to solidify the field, highlighting disciplinary issues and forming social ties. One of the demographers recalled it as an informal gathering of like-minded people, featuring lively discussion and less ideologically-rigid communication. In his recollection, its informal atmosphere and some memorable intellectual (bordering on physical) fights between the scholars helped to delimit the discipline's major themes and objects of study. Publishers of demographic research, most notably “Statistika” and “Progress,” further shaped the boundaries of the discipline.Footnote 56 Several demographers also took upon themselves to popularize their research by discussing falling birthrates in the print media, which were already evident in the Soviet Union during this period. In their popular writing, they highlighted the consequences of falling birthrates, imbalanced life expectancy, and aging for the future of Soviet economic development.Footnote 57
In the early 1960s, the revitalized discipline of demography was still relatively isolated from the international community of demographers, but new channels of communication were opening up. One of the demographers described this period as an “odd scientific mixture,” in which Marxist dogmas coexisted with haphazardly transmitted western demographic concepts.Footnote 58 Foreign publications continued to arrive through library exchanges between Soviet and western libraries, but many of the publications were placed in spetskhrany—special collections of books, journals and other publications, access to which was highly restricted.Footnote 59 The Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences made translated publications in the social sciences available to scholars.Footnote 60 Publications also made their way to the Soviet Union through east European colleagues who had opportunities to interact with their western counterparts.Footnote 61 In the 1970s, new concepts and fields of study penetrated Soviet demography thanks to encounters at rare international conferences and the translation efforts of scholars who were proficient in foreign languages.Footnote 62
More generally, the new decade saw a growing engagement with theories previously rejected as bourgeois. This was evident, for example, in the critical engagement with the optimum theory of population that sought to determine an absolute size of population that yields the maximum return on its economic activities. This macroeconomic theory claimed that the optimum population size is determined in relation to the scarcity of natural resources and capital stock. Aron Ya. Boyarskii criticized the theory for its Malthusian assumptions and for failing to account for the redistribution of wealth in society. But rather than dismissing it outright, he proposed a revised model based on a more dynamic understanding of the optimum in relation to production that could be applied to a socialist planned economy without falling (in his view) into the ideology of Malthusianism or “populationalism” (pronatalism).Footnote 63
To avoid ideological inconsistencies, Boyarskii translated the theory's basic assumptions into mathematical formulas and emphasized the theory's practical utility for central planning founded on scientific principles:
” … The question of the optimal, that is, the most desirable population size in relation to specific economic goals and in the context of specific relations of production is a rightful one … Because the population size and structure, as well as the dynamics of its growth, are still highly important—although never primary—determinants of social development, there is no reason for the state not to shape them in a favorable direction. Marxists have never rejected that kind of “intervention,” which we now call demographic politics.”Footnote 64
In the following years, despite palpable resistance from political economists, the optimum theory of population, or rather “the theory of economic-demographic optimum,” founded on a solid mathematical basis, became a legitimate field of Soviet demographic research that sought to provide the state with an instrument for effective central planning. While in the 1960s Boyarskii referred to it as the bourgeois theory, the following decade saw the theory domesticated and stripped of its bourgeois reference.Footnote 65
This example further demonstrates that late Soviet population research was founded on a variety of epistemological and methodological assumptions that cannot be reduced to Marxist principles. Although Marx rejected the general principal of population devised by Malthus, he did not provide any coherent theory regarding the role of demographic variables in a socialist society.Footnote 66 It is this lacuna that the revitalized demographic research sought to fill. Thus, in the 1970s, demographic behavior and the social norms that determine it were foregrounded in a new wave of scientific development in the discipline. In a demographic encyclopedia edited by Dmitrii Valentei, an entry on demographic behavior notes that the concept is a relatively late addition to the analytical toolkit of Soviet demographers. Its integration into demographic research, the entry continues, began with the scholarly realization that social norms and cultural attitudes determine demographic behavior: matrimonial behavior (related to the norms and values that determine marriage and family formation patterns), reproductive behavior (pertaining to the norms of childbearing and childrearing in a society), and vital behavior (related to health and hygiene habits).Footnote 67
Demographic behavior was also of foremost interest to Soviet scholars who engaged with the theory of demographic transition. Formulated by the French demographer Adolphe Landry in the interwar period and revised by Frank W. Notestein and Kingsley Davis after WWII, this theory provided a unifying theoretical framework for western demography, much as modernization theory provided such a framework for sociology.Footnote 68 It identified the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century as a crucial moment in the European history, in which birthrates began to decline. In the 1970s, Soviet demographers began to borrow from its conceptual apparatus and applied the theory to their analysis of time-dependent changes in demographic trends, fertility in particular.Footnote 69 Unapologetically basing their analysis on the Malthusian model of population, these scholars posited that demographic trends in pre-Soviet and Soviet Russia follow a general European trajectory that tends to be independent of the economic and political structures of these societies.
The combination of falling birthrates in the country and the perception of population growth as essential to central state planning made reproductive behavior a central topic in this new wave of research. In the 1970s, this was evidenced in the growing popularity of demographic research on family. In a collective volume that presented research on demography done by scholars at the TsSU statistical institute, Andrei G. Volkov, the center's director, explained that demographic trends in different parts of the Soviet Union could only be understood in light of the relationship between longstanding values and social norms and the current demographic behavior of families.Footnote 70 Exploiting research conducted in different Soviet republics with low and high fertility rates, the volume accounted for regional differences in fertility by pointing to demographic behavior characteristic of various ethnic groups.Footnote 71 Works based on this research delivered the coup de grâce to the argument that there exists a positive feedback loop between birthrates and wealth. They underscored the lingering effect that social and cultural norms have on families and on demographic behavior, implying that population structure has its own regulatory rules and should thus be studied independently of economic structure.Footnote 72
The claim for the centrality of demographic behavior as determined by social norms and values was accompanied by efforts to popularize demography as an effective administrative instrument.Footnote 73 Volkov, for example, argued that the most effective way to move demographic trends in a socially-favorable direction is to facilitate the formation and internalization of new social norms that would affect demographic behavior.Footnote 74 He proposed what is essentially a moral pedagogical project that would influence the demographic behavior of the coming-of-age generation and encourage the development of new cognitive and behavioral patterns among individuals such as, “… self-control, the recognition of the inherent value of family life, and the cultivation of a personal interest in the wellbeing of other family members.”Footnote 75 In 1973, Valentei recommended instilling in the youth the idea that “large families are happy families” and that the social utility of women hinged on a combination of work and motherhood.Footnote 76 In a communist society, demographers further argued, the endgame of an effective demographic policy is to modify motivations, values, and needs such that people will eventually learn to regulate their own demographic behavior.Footnote 77
This individualization of demographic behavior shaped by values and social norms would become the cornerstone of late Soviet demographic knowledge and of a larger discussion about population decline within the Party leadership. Dmitrii Valentei, in particular, promoted the notion that demography and policymaking were natural bedfellows. Reportedly a master networker and a good politician, Valentei's views advanced the discipline's interactions with the state leadership that led to the first comprehensive demographic policy, implemented in 1981 following the XXVI Party Congress.Footnote 78 Already in 1976, the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress extended maternity leave up to one year. In 1981, the Party adopted an even more generous pronatalist policy with extended maternity leave, job protection policies, and a child allowance, which constituted thirty to sixty percent of average monthly wage at that time.Footnote 79
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the conceptualizations of demographic behavior and its relation to cultural and social norms, advanced by Soviet demographers, led to the de-facto regionalization of population policies. Demographers stressed the centrality of demographic behavior and emphasized its national cultural component that had been initially rejected by the Marxist-Leninist demography.Footnote 80 Some suggested that any demographic policy of stimulating fertility should differentiate between Soviet republics with high and low birthrates, urging pronatalist measures and welfare support only for republics with low birthrates.Footnote 81 In anticipation of the XXVI Party Congress to be held in Moscow in 1981, ideas about the regionalization of demographic policy intensified and the first pronatalist policy, launched that year, was initially introduced in the European republics of the Soviet Union, and only later spread to the rest of the country.Footnote 82 Following the XXVII Party Congress in 1986, the Party pledged to develop and implement “demographic policies that would more fully address particular characteristics of different national regions.”Footnote 83
Post-Soviet Demography: The Vishnevskii-Antonov Rivalry
Demographic behavior as a target of state intervention and a key object of state and self-regulation lies at the heart of the landscape of scientific demography in post-Soviet Russia. This legacy is particularly pronounced in the longstanding intellectual rivalry of two prominent Soviet demographers—Anatolii Vishnevskii and Anatolii Antonov. Their debate, which has captured the public imagination, became even more salient when the population problem was turned into an apocalyptic concern framed as a “demographic crisis” in the post-Soviet period. Vishnevskii, a proponent of the demographic transition theory, speaks of an inherent inertia of population processes that makes demographic behavior virtually impenetrable to state interventions. Antonov, on the other hand, sees the state as capable of altering individual behaviors and changing demographic trends.
Vishnevskii, a highly respected and internationally recognized scholar, is currently the head of the Institute of Demography at the Higher School of Economics. He began his career at the center for demography at the Central Statistical Bureau's research institute and in the mid-1980s moved to the Institute of Sociological Research in the Academy of Sciences. In 1976, he published a monograph titled Demographic Revolution, in which he set out the idea of the demographic transition of fertility and mortality from high to low as applied to pre-Soviet and Soviet demographic fluctuations.Footnote 84 Analytically moving away from Marxist dogmas, he argued that current demographic trends reflect a contemporary conflict between individual and social interests in procreation. Changing values and social norms change behavior and constitute a trigger for further changes in the whole demographic system. The conflict will eventually resolve itself since reproduction will always be the main social function of any demographic system that tends to reproduce itself.Footnote 85
Bringing full force the Malthusian model of population dynamics into the Soviet demography, Vishnevskii introduced the idea of population processes as guided by an autonomous set of rules and regulations. Equally novel was Vishnevskii's view of demographic behavior as a fundamental social function responsible for population reproduction. His theoretical apparatus is enmeshed with his political assessments of the changes resulting from demographic transition. He holds that socio-economic modernization and the universal transition from extended to nuclear families has led to greater weight being placed on individual freedom. These changes affected demographic behavior and altered population structures worldwide. Personally, Vishnevskii views this transition to greater individual autonomy positively and understands the role of the state in ensuring individual autonomy and freedom. His theoretical and political positions led him to stress the futility of state policies in increasing fertility and to underline demographic behavior as an object of self-regulation of autonomous individuals.Footnote 86
Taking his arguments, developed during the late Soviet period, into the post-Soviet debates on the country's demographic future, Vishnevskii maintained that Russia joined other European counties in their transition to low fertility rates with an ever-growing aging population. These demographic patterns have autonomous trajectories of development and cannot be directly correlated with other social, economic, and political processes. Trying to increase birthrates through regulatory policies is doomed to failure because such efforts contradict the universal law of population, which states that there is an internal mechanism through which the demographic system regulates itself. Hence, the skepticism evinced by Vishnevskii and his colleagues concerning the effectiveness of the Maternal Capital policy.Footnote 87 Instead, he considers attracting large-scale migration as a real avenue of recovery from Russia's population decline—a highly unpopular stance in contemporary Russia, where labor migrants from former-Soviet Asian republics are conceived as a threat to the nation's sovereignty and security.Footnote 88
The other side of this debate finds its origins in the value-based theory of reproductive behavior that gained ground in the mid-1970s. It has been given voice by Anatolii Antonov, professor of sociology at Moscow State University and Vishnevskii's personal opponent. Antonov located the essence of the population problem not in the inertia of demographic processes but in the changing morality underlying individual behavior. For him, the demographic crisis was really a moral crisis. In his view, the plunging fertility rates were directly related to diminishing childbearing values and a declining normative need for children (potrebnost΄ v detiakh) in contemporary society.Footnote 89 This theory, as well as Antonov's polemic with Vishnevskii, achieved further popularity in the post-Soviet period, influencing the popular discourse on the demographic crisis.
Although his theory largely aligns with Vishnevskii's historical diagnosis in regard to the value of children and family, Antonov negatively assesses their changing role and the growing value of individual freedom in contemporary societies.Footnote 90 Contrary to the assumptions that led Vishnevskii to be skeptical of the state's ability to affect social norms with pronatalist policies, Antonov and his colleagues claim that by strengthening the family's moral and economic values and thus making it financially and socially advantageous to have more children, the state can stimulate fertility and reverse worrisome population trends. In his Soviet and post-Soviet publications, Antonov has called for pronatalist interventions to re-impart the value of family life, both as an economic value and as a moral and normative ideal, positioning the state as key to reversing unfortunate demographic trends.Footnote 91
If, for Vishnevskii, the state should safeguard individual autonomy in relation to reproduction, for Antonov, the task of regulating and changing demographic behavior properly belongs to the state. Contrary to the idea of a pre-determined trajectory of demographic dynamics that is not amenable to state engineering, suggested by Vishnevskii, Antonov staunchly believes in the capacity of social and political forces to alter individual attitudes toward birth, marriage, and family. Soviet paternalist state policies and the integration of women into the workforce stripped the family of its significance as the basic unit of production and caused a declining demand for children (potrebnost΄ v detiakh). It is the obligation of the post-Soviet state and its agencies, he further argued, to provide structural (but not necessarily monetary) incentives for childbearing. The state can change its citizens’ normative behavior by incentivizing them to have more children through a variety of tax policies and the development of family businesses.Footnote 92
Regulating demographic behavior, according to Antonov, is a two-tiered process in which first, families that decide to have multiple children should be able to do so without fearing for their material wellbeing, “because in our country, giving birth to a second child usually throws a family under the poverty line,” he told me in an interview. “Only after that,” Antonov continued, “should we restore the prestige of family and marriage and introduce policies that will ensure that people want to get married and have more than just one child, as is the case today.”Footnote 93 Although conservative in his views, in my interview with him, Antonov argued against dogmatic Russian Orthodox Church interventions and its attempts to frame abortion as murder, noting that then “one would have to call millions of Soviet women murderers.”Footnote 94 In his writings, he nevertheless stresses the relations between falling birthrates and the moral decadence that led women to abandon their reproductive roles.Footnote 95
In an interview, I asked Antonov about policies that might restore people's desire for children. By way of answer, he sketched a plan on a piece of paper, scribbling a series of rectangles and triangles with corresponding arrows, which were meant to mediate between the policies proposed by the state-science alliance and society. Using a complex set of arrows, Antonov outlined the relationship between the state and science based on a feedback loop that together, in his view, devise and implement pronatalist policies that would ultimately yield the best possible demographic outcomes. Under the supervision of its scientific advisors, the state ought to re-allocate its resources to craft a comprehensive regulatory policy aimed at fostering new norms of reproductive and demographic behavior. The state stands at the center of this intervention, and demographers stand as its main theorists.Footnote 96
Notwithstanding their conflicting views on the nature of population processes, both Antonov and Vishnevskii construe behavioral change as the main means of transforming population dynamics, thus rendering it the primary object of analysis and administration. While for the advocates of Antonov's theory individual behavior and personal reproductive values might be transformed through a targeted demographic policy, proponents of the demographic transition theory contend that demographic behavior will change in response to the basic need of a society to reproduce itself, irrespective of governmental intervention. Thus, while they differ in their understanding of normative behavior, both approaches take behavior as the basic unit of analysis for analyzing and predicting future demographic trends. Moreover, both have made moral arguments about behavioral change and its effects on the population structure. While Vishnevskii views this change positively, Antonov attributes dire consequences to it. Antonov, who is more conservative in his political views than Vishnevskii, is less critical of the Maternal Capital policy, because he views the role of the state as crucial in changing demographic trends.
The post-Soviet demographic community inherited this conceptual toolkit, which views population structure as a function of behavioral change, population growth as essential to economic modeling, and state intervention as central in addressing population change. Their engagement with policymakers—another Soviet legacy—has rendered behavior the target of governmental population interventions, either through direct intervention or through cultivating mechanisms for self-regulation. Through this late Soviet legacy, demography contributes ideas about what kinds of demographic behavior ought to be valued by society and continues to shape the categories of post-Soviet discourse on the demographic crisis.
Translating Demographic Expertise into Neoliberal Policy: By Way of Conclusion
The liberalization of the social sciences during the Khrushchev “Thaw” brought about a fresh attempt to interpret Malthusian and Marxist views toward population. The move from more structural perspectives on population to a more behaviorist approach, in which Malthusian models of population featured prominently, led to the framing of demographic behavior and citizens’ reproductive choices as a threat and an object of regulation. Whether the population was construed in terms of “overpopulation” (in Central Asian republics) or “underpopulation” (in the European parts of the Soviet Union), it was marked by anxious narratives about individual behavior that emerged from the epistemological apparatus of the discipline itself.Footnote 97 This thinking was inherited by post-Soviet demographers; knowledge produced by demographers in the late-Soviet period became a means for generating contemporary political ideas about normative and “responsible” demographic behavior.
In the process of formulating population policies, post-Soviet state agencies turned to experts in demography, whose knowledge practices and conceptual models grew out of particular historical and disciplinary trajectories. In conveying the mechanisms of population reproduction, these experts contributed to the discussion the notion that transformations in population structure are caused by changes in demographic behavior, which is a legitimate target of state interventions as well as a key object of self-regulation. Policymakers, often economists, claiming their own authority over population issues—another case of jurisdictional conflict set into motion by the new political environment—re-problematized this notion of behavior in order to produce neoliberal policy solutions. According to this re-problematized logic, monetary incentives should assist individuals in changing their behavior and their attitudes towards family and childbearing.
In neoliberal Russia, the state—far from being an obsolete entity—borrows conceptual models developed in a different political and historical context to advance political and institutional practices in the service of the new neoliberal art of government. The article has demonstrated how Soviet ideas about the need for state intervention and population growth as crucial to central state planning get reprogrammed into the new neoliberal policy doctrine. These ideas are retained and become part of contemporary policymaking through the development and checkered trajectory of demographic thought. Thus, the “Maternal Capital” neoliberal emphasis on calculating individuals is enhanced by the re-problematized perceptions of individual behavior as the core of the population problem. When disassembled and seen from a historical perspective, what might appear as a reflection of a contemporary neoliberal political reality is revealed to have deeper origins in the late Soviet period, politically and conceptually distant from the current neoliberal order. Knowledge produced by demographers in the late Soviet period provided the foundation for the post-Soviet neoliberal state efforts to solve the perceived population crisis.
Disassembling the discourse on the demographic crisis allows us to move beyond the particular Russian case into a theoretical discussion of neoliberalism. Borrowing from Johanna Bockman, this case study reveals the “parasitic nature” of neoliberalism and its capacity to distort forms of knowledge and create bureaucratic and ideological practices based on theoretical principles developed under a historically and ideologically distant and distinct form of government.Footnote 98
