Russia’s birthrate began to decline in the 1960s; in combination with very high male mortality during the 1990s, the decline produced rapid population losses amounting to 5.1 million people from 1990 to 2010. From 2006 this “demographic crisis” became a central policy concern of Putin’s regime. In Caring Like a State: The Politics of Russia’s Demographic Crisis, Inna Leykin elucidates every dimension of Russian demography’s practice and politics—population experts, state and nonstate actors, and ordinary citizens. This is an impressive book based on twenty-four months of ethnographic study in Yekaterinburg between 2007 and 2018. Leykin shows how the high-stakes demographic crisis opened an extraordinary opportunity for professional demographers, who used it to greatly increase their visibility and funding as well as insert themselves into professional dialogue and influence Putin’s pronatalist policies. Campaigns by socially-oriented nongovernmental organizations (SONGOs) to promote traditional values and family life among young people are covered, as are Putin’s transactional pronatalist monetary incentives (Maternity Capital). Leykin’s interviews with mothers reveal that not much has changed for them since Soviet times. The conclusion focuses on the war in Ukraine, arguing that Putin intends to address Russia’s demographic decline through imperial aggression. A native Russian speaker, Leykin had exceptional opportunities as a participant-observer in a major demographic research center, working on projects while observing the demographers’ work environment, interrelations, research, and strategies for promoting their profession. During this period instruction in demographic literacy was made a required part of professional training for administrators and officials at all levels in Russia, and demographers regularly served on federal and regional expert committees. Leykin attended many of these sessions and takes the reader into them, showing how demographers “enacted expertise and claimed epistemic authority” by explaining concepts such as fertility rates and drove home the urgency of the issue with dramatic graphical representations suggesting demographic catastrophe (pp. 56–7). She explains the state’s ideal of the nuclear family: married heterosexual parents with two or more children. Her meetings and observations of pro-family SONGOs give immediacy to the efforts of these impassioned activists to convince young citizens that family life is crucial for their future happiness. Interviews with mothers reveal their struggles with housing and shortages of preschool childcare and show that the Soviet-era babushka and reliance on extended families remain common despite the state’s efforts to promote itself as a caregiver. One of Leykin’s most interesting and original contributions is her rich discussion of the perceived causes of demographic decline in Russia, including continued low fertility rates despite the governments’ efforts to raise them. Her research shows that the dominant view among demographers, SONGO activists, and many others is that low fertility results from moral failings, a spiritual deficit, or lack of understanding among young people about how to form or be part of a family. Various reasons for these failings are cited: the Soviet state’s paternalism undermined traditional families, the trauma of post-Soviet transition ruptured families, and more recently the corrupting influence of the West has damaged Russians’ morality. Leykin explains that from the 1970s there was a division between two prominent demographers. Anatoly Vishnevsky argued that Russia’s fertility decline resulted from a global demographic transition to lower fertility that the state could not reverse. Anatoly Antonov held that the cause was a crisis of morality in Russia, and that the state could change demographic trends with normative approaches and material incentives that would change behavior. Antonov’s view, based on “Russian exceptionalism” prevailed and informed the Putin regime’s pronatalist policies, which largely failed to raise fertility rates. Discussion of why otherwise highly professional demographers subscribed to the claim of “Russian exceptionalism” would have been helpful. Leykin’s last chapter argues convincingly that Putin now intends to solve Russia’s demographic crisis through his “imperial project” of forcibly incorporating neighboring regions that include Russian populations, beginning with Crimea and extending into the contested regions of Ukraine. The project includes the kidnapping of children. She points to problems with this solution, and we can hope for its failure. Overall, this is an exceptional ethnography that reveals the mindsets, discourses, and work of Russian demographers, officials, and civil society activists, as well as the lives of ordinary citizens affected by their work. It takes the reader on a deep dive into a critical area of Russia’s policy production not long before the government closed the country to such research. It will be of great interest to regional specialists, ethnographers, political scientists, and others who want to understand Russia.
Linda J. Cook (Sun,) studied this question.
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