By Adela Suliman
Faced with a worrisome decline in Russia’s population, President Vladimir Putin this week revived a Soviet-era award launched in 1944, to encourage Russians to supersize their families.
The “Mother Heroine” award, published in a decree on Monday, goes to women who bear 10 or more children, offering financial incentives and social kudos in a bid to spur population growth.
The honorary medal was established by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union and given to around 400 000 citizens, according to the Russian media.
The revived award will offer Russian citizens a one-time payment of 1 million rubles (about R280 000) after their 10th child turns one year old – and only if the other nine children have all survived.
No mention of the war in Ukraine was linked to the medal.
However, the Stalin-era accolade was originally launched as part of a wider social package of “pronatalist” measures taken toward the end of World War II, Kristin Roth-Ey, associate professor at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, said on Wednesday.
“It was about service to the motherland,” she said. Its revival is “obviously a conscious echo of the Stalinist past”.
Roth-Ey said the award was created when the Soviet Union was trying to “plan for post-war reconstruction” and support families as “the core institution of Soviet society”. Other measures included better health care for women, financial aid and making it harder for married couples to get divorced, she added.
“The war led to high anxiety about population loss… It has resonances obviously with what is going on right now,” she added, referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which the Kremlin terms a special military operation.
Last month, CIA director William Burns estimated that about 15 000 Russian soldiers had been killed in the Ukraine war and up to 45 000 more wounded. He cited the latest US intelligence on Russian losses.
Nearly eight decades after Stalin’s decree, having lots of children is still viewed as “part of being a good Russian citizen”, said Roth-Ey, and it is common in other “authoritarian… nationalist movements that we see in places like Hungry and other parts of Central and Eastern Europe.”
In Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, World War II remains a large part of the national psyche. The defeat of Nazi Germany is celebrated each year on May 9, Victory Day, a Russian holiday of national remembrance marked by much pomp and patriotic fervour.
The revival of the motherhood medal is part of a “patriotic campaign” that has ramped up in Russia since it annexed Crimea in 2014, Roth-Ey added.
The original Soviet medal was a gold star superimposed on a silver pentagon and decorated in red enamel reading “Мать-героиня” (Mother Heroine).
Putin, 69, is one of three children, but his brothers died in infancy before he was born. He first lent his support to reviving the award on June 1, Children’s Day.
“As a rule, you can really rely on those who were brought up in a large family,” he said in a speech marking the occasion. “They will not let down a friend or colleagues, or their motherland.”
Since 2008, the Kremlin has also awarded the “Order of Parental Glory” to parents who have more than seven children. They receive 50 000 rubles and a certificate when their seventh child reaches three years old.
Dina Fainberg, the author of “Cold War Correspondents” and an associate professor of modern history, agrees that the revival of the Mother Heroine award is part of similar postwar “drive toward state-led patriotism” by Putin.
But she said the reasoning was not necessarily the conflict in Ukraine.
“Ukraine is still not called a war,” she said of the nearly six-month invasion. “Putin and his team took great care not to depict it as a war. If you start calling it a war, you undermine stability and make people panic.”
More than just “nostalgia” for the old Soviet empire, a bigger issue in Putin’s mind might be demographic decline, she said.
The Russians “have an issue with population decline, obviously, and a demographic crisis”. Fainberg said. But there was a “growing return of the patriarchal state”, she added, with Putin viewing himself as the symbolic male head of the Russian family, around which everyone could rally, and the ultimate “protector of the elderly, women and children” from Russia’s enemies.
Russia’s population, now estimated at fewer than 145 million, is in decline due to low birthrates and an ageing populace – issues not unique to Russia but afflicting a number of developed countries.
As such, Putin has long sought to boost Russian birthrates.
In June, he called Russia’s demographic situation “extremely difficult” and called for “drastic” measures in response. Last year, he lamented that “there are not enough working hands” in the country with the biggest landmass in the world.
In the first six months of 2022, 6.3% fewer children were born in Russia than in the same period a year earlier, Russia’s RBC outlet reported, citing data from Rosstat, a government statistics agency.
But demographic expert Sarah Harper, the director of the Oxford Institute of population ageing, said state policies to boost population were rarely successful.
“Demographically, such polices simply don’t work,” she said. “The problem is you have a baby now, and it’s 20 years before that baby is productive.”
Such population policies can be more common in dictatorships or authoritarian regimes where “there is long-term strategic planning”, as opposed to liberal democracies, Harper said. In any case, she said, in the 21st century “the quality” of a country’s people was more crucial to a country’s success than the quantity.
“Boosting population is very, very difficult,” she added. Immigration remains a key factor, but it comes with its own political “tension”, making it a less popular remedy in Russia and elsewhere.
For Roth-Ey, whether modern Russian women will take up the incentive of the motherhood award remains to be seen.
“I don’t see contemporary young Russian women really responding to the call,” she said. “They have other things on their mind.”
The Washington Post’s Mary Ilyushina contributed to this report.
