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RUSSIA IS IN DEMOGRAPHIC FREE FALL. PUTIN ISN’T HELPING.  
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Anna Nemtsova
April 29, 2025
The Atlantic
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_ The Russian president is enacting one of the world’s most extreme
natalism programs—and one of the weirdest. _

, Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP / Getty

 

Russia was in demographic decline long before the war in Ukraine. Now
it’s in free fall.

Since 2022, hundreds of thousands of Russians have died or suffered
critical injuries in Ukraine. The result: According to one
demographer, Russians may have had fewer children from January to
March 2025 than in any three-month period over the past 200 years
[[link removed]].
As of 2023, the country’s fertility rate—1.4 births per
woman—lies well below replacement level and amounts to a roughly 20
percent drop compared with 2015. In some regions, births fell that
much in just 12 months. Last year, deaths outpaced births by more than
half a million.

This crisis has led to one of the world’s most extreme natalism
campaigns—and one of the weirdest. President Vladimir Putin has
commanded his government to “stimulate”
[[link removed]] Russian women
to have at least three children, and to make sure they get
pregnant when they’re young [[link removed]].
To that end, the Ministry of Education has been discussing ways to
create “conditions for romantic relations” in schools. Last month,
Moscow’s Department of Health displayed giant pink banners
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the city asking women, How’s it going? Still haven’t given birth?

If this is supposed to make them want to procreate, it doesn’t seem
to be working—at least not for Larisa, a 21-year-old university
student who was incredulous when she saw the sign on her way to
campus. Even though her parents cover the cost of her car and
apartment, she told me, “I have enough money to pay just for my
food. Forget three babies.” Indeed, the Kremlin’s own polling
[[link removed]] has shown that
almost 40 percent of Russian women of childbearing age say they
won’t have kids in the next five years because of financial
concerns.

Most of Larisa’s friends are like her: women in their early 20s who
came to Moscow to study and start their career. That’s precisely the
path that Russian leaders are trying to discourage. Irina Filatova, a
member of Parliament, recently warned
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young women’s ideas about “self-development” are a threat to
Russia’s “traditional family values.” But if they insist on
going to college, then at least they should find a husband there, so
they “can give birth at age 18 or 19,” another female
legislator suggested
[[link removed]] last
year.

To assuage concerns about the cost of having kids, authorities in the
Oryol region recently began offering pregnant students $1,200. Daria
Yakovleva, a women’s-rights activist, told me that such programs may
lead girls to think of childbearing as a ticket to economic security,
even though having children in Russia often entrenches poverty.
Svetlana Gannushkina witnesses these financial burdens firsthand. A
human-rights advocate who served on Russia’s Presidential Council
for Civil Society and Human Rights, Gannushkina helps low-income
families that are unable to provide for their children. She doesn’t
see government handouts as a solution. “Paying girls money for
pregnancies is a strange approach,” Gannushkina told me.
“Authorities should be forcing men to feel responsible, first of
all, but so far, all we hear is demands for women—what women should
not do or should do.”

One of Gannushkina’s clients, Takhmina, is pregnant with her eighth
child, and her husband makes less than $800 a month. Gannushkina told
me that the state was supposed to send them financial aid but has
withheld it since a right-wing mob attacked Takhmina’s family online
because they’re ethnically Tajik. Evidently, Gannushkina said,
“she is not the kind of pregnant woman they want.”

The Russian government is trying not only to encourage pregnancies but
also to make terminating them as hard as possible. Politicians
have restricted
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to abortion, and regulators are clamping down
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of abortion pills such as mifepristone.

None of these interventions addresses an underlying reason Russian
women say they don’t want children—the country’s “negative
political situation
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euphemism for authoritarianism and war.

Russia’s leaders rarely acknowledge the toll this “situation”
takes on citizens. Many women are depressed, lonely, and afraid. Every
day, the war makes more of them widows. For others, the source of fear
is the country’s pervasive problem with domestic violence
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which the government partially decriminalized
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2017. Earlier this month, one particularly shocking case garnered
national attention. A Russian mother named Ksenia Dushanova alleged
that her boyfriend attacked her while she was asleep, gouging out one
of her eyes with a car key, breaking her arm, and slashing her face.
She posted images of her injuries on Instagram and wrote that her
assailant had apparently been released from custody when he’d agreed
to fight in the war.

The Russian activist Alena Popova leads a group that documents
[[link removed]] domestic violence across the country, with a
focus on abuses committed by service members coming back from the
front. Last year, she told me, more than 2,500 Russians contacted her
team asking for help. The group also tracks the violence and
mistreatment [[link removed]] that many pregnant women experience
in hospitals. One patient who received an abortion in the city of
Surgut told [[link removed]] local media that her
doctors provided no pain relief and told her, when she cried out, to
“shut up and not perform as in a circus.”

As part of its campaign to deter abortions, the state enlists doctors
to create “positive attitudes toward having children”
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pre-abortion consultations. Local governments report how many minds
they change; last week, the region containing Surgut said that last
year its doctors had persuaded 1,249 women who’d considered
terminating their pregnancy to give birth. In a concerning sign for
the government, the tally was lower than last year’s.

Putin’s biggest problem, though, won’t be solved by convincing
women to carry their pregnancy to term. He’s created a society that
Russians no longer want to bring children into. Getting them to
reconsider will take more than government checks and pink banners.

_Anna Nemtsova [[link removed]] is
a frequent contributor to THE ATLANTIC and a correspondent for
the Daily Beast covering Eastern Europe._

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* Russia
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* Demographics
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* natalism
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* Vladimir Putin
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* Ukraine
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* women's rights
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* domestic violence
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