Authors

Discussion

Since launching its large-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s regime has been placing increasing importance on the ‘demographic crisis’ attributed to the declining birth rate. This is evidenced by the creation of new bureaucratic bodies responsible for adjusting demographic policy, such as the Mendeleev Institute, established in 2022, and the Presidential Council on Demographic and Family Policy, created in 2024.

The new version of Russian demographic policy places greater emphasis on the moral component, relying on the promotion of ‘traditional family values’, which has proved to be more repressive than before. Thus, measures taken after 2022 included the extension of the ban on ‘propaganda in favour of non-traditional sexual relations’, the prohibition of gender confirmation surgery, the forbidding of changing the gender marker in official documents and, indeed, the ban on so-called ‘childless ideology’. These measures were justified as a response to the ‘psychological’ and ‘cultural’ war waged by the West against Russia, but also as a means of boosting demographics in wartime – although the link between war and birth rates is not explicitly stated.

I suggest exploring the links between the more aggressive and repressive promotion of traditional family values and the state’s pro-natalist agenda, which is primarily based on support for motherhood and childcare but which has not seen a significant increase in public investment. I argue that this configuration highlights not only the (unjustified) conviction of Russian officials that propaganda promoting traditional values can alter demographic patterns, but also the economic limitations of Putinist pro-natalism. The latter is hampered both by increased military spending and by the neoliberal logic of Russian personalist authoritarianism.