Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-qsmjn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T22:11:29.980Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The History and Afterlife of Soviet Demography: The Socialist Roots of Post-Soviet Neoliberalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2019

Abstract

The discourse on the demographic crisis in contemporary Russia resonates with a neoliberal political project that attempts to govern populations through the market logic of optimization, responsibilization, and efficacy. Yet, as this article argues, the basic categories of the discourse, although evocative of a new neoliberal rationality, were in fact born of epistemological changes that took place in the Soviet science of population in the last decades of the USSR. Specifically, the analytical shift from Marxist-Leninist demography, which stressed a strong economic determinism, to the concept of demographic behavior, which became central to the discipline's analytical toolkit in the late Soviet period, produced political ideas in which individual behavior became both the core of the population problem and its solution. The article follows these institutional and conceptual transformations and shows how knowledge produced by Soviet demographers in that period continues to provide the foundation for neoliberal state efforts to solve the population problem. When seen from a historical perspective, the neoliberal character of the new population policies loses its apparent ideological and political coherence.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This essay has benefited from the close reading and comments of Michele Rivkin-Fish, Michal Kravel-Tovi, Erica Weiss, Yifat Gutman, and Tom Pessah. I am also grateful to audiences at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, both in Tel Aviv University, and at the 49th Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies for their helpful critical comments on earlier drafts. Research for this article was supported by the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. I would also like to thank The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University for funding portions of this research and writing. I am particularly grateful to Harriet Murav, whose intellectual generosity and editorial guidance was invaluable in helping me strengthen the essay; and to the anonymous reviewers who offered perceptive and productive guidance for revision.

References

1. For up-to-date statistical data, see www.gks.ru/bgd/regl/b11_12/Main.htm (last accessed December 17, 2018).

2. As a political rationality, neoliberalism appeals to individual freedom and relies on the increasing call for self-care and personal responsibility. Following scholars of neoliberalism, I refer to the process of responsibilization, associated with neoliberal political rationality, as a governing practice that misrecognizes the structural roots of social problems and turns citizens into self-reliant and responsibility-taking agents. See, for example: Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 (London, 2008)Google Scholar; Rose, Nikolas, “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies,” in The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, Sharma, Aradhana and Gupta, Akhil, eds. (Malden, Mass, 2006), 144–62Google Scholar; Ong, Aihwa, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, “Cities and the Geographies of Actually Existing Neoliberalism,” ANTIPODE 34, no. 3 (July 2002): 349–79; see, for example, Makovicky, Nicolette, ed., Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism: Enterprising Selves in Changing Economies (Farnham, 2014)Google Scholar; Matza, Tomas, “Moscow’s Echo: Technologies of the Self, Publics, and Politics on the Russian Talk Show,” Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 3 (August 2009): 489522CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matza, Tomas, “‘Good Individualism’? Psychology, Ethics, and Neoliberalism in Postsocialist Russia,” American Ethnologist 39, no. 4 (2012): 805–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reeves, Madeleine, “Afterword: Neoliberal Opportunism,” Anthropology Matters 15, no. 1 (2014): 139–48Google Scholar.

4. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, 1999); Martha Lampland, The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary (Chicago, 1995); David Stark and László Bruszt, “One Way or Multiple Paths: For a Comparative Sociology of East European Capitalism,” American Journal of Sociology 106, no. 4 (January 2001): 1129–37; for the Chinese case see: Andrew Kipnis, “Audit Cultures: Neoliberal Governmentality, Socialist Legacy, or Technologies of Governing?,” American Ethnologist 35, no. 2 (May 2008): 275–89; Donald M. Nonini, “Is China Becoming Neoliberal?,” Critique of Anthropology 28, no. 2 (June 2008): 145–76.

5. Stephen J. Collier, Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (Princeton, 2011); Elizabeth C. Dunn, Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Ithaca, 2004); Olga Shevchenko, Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (Bloomington, Ind., 2009); Olga Shevchenko, “Resisting Resistance: Everyday Life, Practical Competence and Neoliberal Rhetoric in Postsocialist Russia,” in Choi Chatterjee, David L. Ransel, Mary Cavender, and Karen Petrone, eds., Everyday Life in Russia: Past and Present (Bloomington, Ind., 2015), 52–71; Alexei Yurchak, “Russian Neoliberal: The Entrepreneurial Ethic and the Spirit of ‘True Careerism,’” Russian Review 62, no. 1 (January 2003): 72–90; Julia Lerner and Claudia Zbenovich, “Adapting the Therapeutic Discourse to Post-Soviet Media Culture: The Case of Modnyi Prigovor,” Slavic Review 72, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 828–49; Inna Leykin, “Rodologia: Genealogy as Therapy in Post-Soviet Russia,” Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 43, no. 2 (June 2015): 157.

6. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979.

7. Gil Eyal, The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia (Minneapolis, 2003); see also Gil Eyal, Iván Szelényi, and Eleanor R. Townsley, Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe (London , 1998).

8. Collier, Post-Soviet Social.

9. Johanna Bockman, “The Origins of Neoliberalism between Soviet Socialism and Western Capitalism: ‘A Galaxy without Borders,’” Theory and Society 36, no. 4 (2007): 343–71; Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Stanford, 2013); on the role of critical scholarship in constructing neoliberalism as a coherent doctrine see Collier, Post-Soviet Social, 248.

10. Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism; see also Kipnis, “Audit Cultures.”

11. For more information on the Maternal Capital Program, see Pro-materinskii-kapital.ru at http://pro-materinskiy-kapital.ru/ (last accessed December 18, 2018).

12. Michele Rivkin-Fish, “Pronatalism, Gender Politics, and the Renewal of Family Support in Russia: Toward a Feminist Anthropology of ‘Maternity Capital,’” Slavic Review 69, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 701–24; see also Anna Rotkirch, Anna Temkina, and Elena Zdravomyslova, “Who Helps the Degraded Housewife?: Comments on Vladimir Putin’s Demographic Speech,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 14, no. 4 (November 2007): 349–58; Olga A. Avdeyeva, “Policy Experiment in Russia: Cash-for-Babies and Fertility Change,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 18, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 361–86.

13. Lynne Haney, “‘But We Are Still Mothers’: Gender, the State, and the Construction of Need in Postsocialist Hungary,” in Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, eds., Uncertain Tradition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World (Lanham, 1999), 151–88; Lynne Haney, Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary (Berkeley, 2002). See also: Rivkin-Fish, “Pronatalism, Gender Politics, and the Renewal of Family Support in Russia.”

14. Elena Zdravomyslova and Anna Temkina, “Sovetskii etakraticheskii gendernyi poriadok (The Etitization of the Soviet Gender Order),” in Elena Zdravomyslova and Anna Temkina, eds., Rossiiskii gendernyi poriadok: Sotsiologicheskii odkhod (St. Petersburg, 2007).

15. KPSS, “Materialy XXVII s΄ezda Partii Sovetskogo Souza (Materials from the XXVII Soviet Union’s Party Congress),” (Moscow, 1986), 52, 154.

16. Alexandre Avdeev and Alain Monnier, “A Survey of Modern Russian Fertility,” Population: An English Selection 7 (1995): 1–38; Avdeyeva, “Policy Experiment in Russia.”

17. Gil Eyal, “Anti-Politics and the Spirit of Capitalism: Dissidents, Monetarists, and the Czech Transition to Capitalism,” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (2000): 49–92; Serguei Alex Oushakine, The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (Ithaca, 2009); Serguei Alex. Oushakine, “‘Stop the Invasion!’: Money, Patriotism, and Conspiracy in Russia,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 76, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 71–116.

18. Matza, “‘Good Individualism’?”.

19. Anatolii Antonov, interview, Moscow, June 23, 2008.

20. Anonymous interview, Yekaterinburg, March 11, 2010.

21. Leonid Rybakovsky, “Rezul΄tativnost΄ kak osnovnoi pokazatel΄ otsenki sostoianiia i tendentsii rozhdaemosti (Effectiveness as the Main Indicator of Fertility Trends),” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 4 (2016): 24.

22. Anatolii G. Vishnevskii, Rossiia pered demograficheskim vyborom (Russia and Demographic Options) (Moscow, 2007).

23. Anatolii Antonov, “Demograficheskaia i semeinaia politika: Zabluzhdeniia, mify i istina,” (Demographic and Family Policies: Fallacies, Myths and Truth), Institut demograficheskikh issledovanii, demographia.ru, at http://www.demographia.ru/articles_N/index.html?idR=19&idArt=389 (last accessed December 18, 2018).

24. For a broader discussion of responsibilization see, for example, Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London, 2009); Nikolas Rose, “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies,” in Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, eds., The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (Oxford, 2006), 144–62; Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, 2006).

25. Alain Blum, Rodit’sia, zhit’ i umeret΄ v SSSR. 1917–1991 (To be Born, to Live and to Die in the USSR. 1917–1991), trans. Emiliia Kustova and Irina Troitskaia (Moscow, 2005); Peter Holquist, “‘In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes’: The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia’s Resettlement Administration,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 151-79; Alessandro Stanziani, “European Statistics, Russian Numbers, and Social Dynamics, 1861–1914,” Slavic Review 76, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 1–23.

26. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society: With Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (London, 1798). Charles Briggs, “Malthus’ Anti-Rhetorical Rhetoric, or, on the Magical Conversion of the Imaginary into the Real,” in Simon Szreter, Hania Sholkamy, and A. Dharmalingam, eds., Categories and Contexts: Anthropological and Historical Studies in Critical Demography (Oxford, 2004), 57–78; Mitchell Dean, “The Malthus Effect: Population and the Liberal Government of Life,” Economy and Society 44, no. 1 (February 2015): 18–39; Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning (Cambridge, Mass, 1998); Corinna R. Unger and Heinrich Hartmann, “Counting, Constructing, and Controlling Populations: The History of Demography, Population Studies, and Family Planning in the Twentieth Century,” in Heinrich Hartmann and Corinna R. Unger, eds., A World of Populations: Transnational Perspectives on Demography in the Twentieth Century ( New York, 2014), 1–15; Kaspar Villadsen and Ayo Wahlberg, “The Government of Life: Managing Populations, Health and Scarcity,” Economy and Society 44, no. 1 (2015): 1–17.

27. Alfred J Jr. DiMaio, “Evolution of Soviet Population Thought: From Marxism-Leninism to the Literaturnaya Gazeta Debate,” in Helen Desfosses, ed., Soviet Population Policy: Conflicts and Constraints (New York, 1981), 157–78; Michelle Perrot, “Malthusianism and Socialism,” in Jacques Dupâquier, A. Fauve-Chamoux, and E. Grebenik, eds., Malthus Past and Present: Population and Social Structure (London, 1983), 257–74; Eric Vilquin, “History of Population Thought,” in Graziella Caselli, Jacques Vallin, and Guillaume Wunsch, eds., Demography: Analysis and Synthesis: A Treatise in Population Studies, Vol. 4, (Amsterdam, 2005), 5–26.

28. Perrot, “Malthusianism and Socialism.”

29. Blum, Rodit’sia, zhit’ i umeret’ v SSSR, 52–55; David Lloyd Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, 2011), 133.

30. Alain Blum, “Social History as the History of Measuring Populations: A Post-1987 Renewal,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2, no. 2 (2001): 279–94; Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, 2006); Anatolii Vishnevskii, “Trudnoe vozrozhdenie demografii” (The Difficult Resurgence of Demography],” Sotsiologicheskii zhurnal 1–2 (1996): 93–116.

31. For a detailed analysis of the tragic history of the 1937 census, see: Blum, “Social History as the History of Measuring Populations”; Alain Blum and Martine Mespoulet, Biurokraticheskaia anarkhiia. Statistika i vlast pri Staline (Bureaucratic Anarchy: Statistics and Power under Stalin) (Moscow, 2006); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, 2005); Mark Tolts, “Nedostupnoe izmerenie,” (Inaccessible Dimension) in Anatolii Vishnevskii, ed., V Chelovecheskom izmerenii (In the Human Dimension) (Moscow, 1989): 325–42; Mark Tolts, “Tainy sovetskoi demografii,” (The Secrets of Soviet Demography) Demoskop Weekly 171–172 (27 September–10 October, 2004), at www.demoscope.ru/weekly/2004/0171/analit06.php (last accessed March 4, 2019); Mark Tolts, “Population Trends in the Russian Federation: Reflections on the Legacy of Soviet Censorship and Distortions of Demographic Statistics,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 49, no. 1 (2008): 87–98; Andrei Volkov, “Perepis΄ naseleniia 1937 goda: Vymysly i pravda (1937 Census: Myths and Truth),” in Izbrannye demograficheskie trudy (Selection of Work in Demography) (Moscow, 2014), 121–67.

32. After the death of Stalin, certain indicators became publically available, but since 1974, most of the data (age distribution, life expectancy, birth parity and more) were classified again as “for internal use only” (dlia sluzhebnogo pol’zovaniia). Vishnevskii, “Trudnoe vozrozhdenie demografii”; Marksim Denisenko and Valery Elizarov, eds., Razvitie naseleniia i demograficheskaia politika. Pamiati A.Ia. Kvashi (Population Development and Demographic Policies. In Memory of A.Ya. Kvasha) (Moscow, 2014), 40; Tolts, “Tainy sovetskoi demografii”; Mark Tolts, “The Failure of Demographic Statistics: A Soviet Response to Population Troubles” (paper, IUSSP XXIVth General Population Conference, Salvador-Bahia, Brazil, 2001); Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, “Toward a Joint Future beyond the Iron Curtain: East–West Politics of Global Modelling,” in Jenny Andersson and Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, eds., The Struggle for the Long Term in Transnational Science and Politics: Forging the Future, ed. (London, 2015), 15–17. It is important to note that during the Cold War, certain topics deemed relevant to national security could not be published publically on the both sides of the Iron Curtain. Such was, for example, the case of mathematical economics. Johanna Bockman and Michael A. Bernstein, “Scientific Community in a Divided World: Economists, Planning, and Research Priority during the Cold War,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 3 (2008): 591.

33. Blum, Roditsia, Zhit i Umeret v SSSR. 1917-1991; see also Steven Rosefielde, “Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR: A Rejoinder to Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver,” Slavic Review 45, no. 2 (1986): 302–302.

34. Blum and Mespoulet, Biurokraticheskaia anarkhia; Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses; Holquist, “‘In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes.’”

35. Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars.

36. Valentina Steshenko, “Mikhail Vasil’evich Ptukha kak demograf, 1884–1961 (Mikhail Vasil’evich Ptukha as Demographer 1884–1961),” Demoskop Weekly, 35–36 (24 September–7 October, 2001), at http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/035/nauka03.php (last accessed December 20, 2018).

37. Blum, Rodit’sia, zhit’ i umeret’ v SSSR, 39.

38. Aron Ia. Boiarskii, “Demografiia kak nauka (Demography as Science),” in Naselenie i metody ego izucheniia: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Population and the Methods of Population Research) (Moscow, 1975), 13–19.

39. Mie Nakachi, “Liberation without Contraception: The Rise of the Abortion Empire and Pronatalism in Socialist and Postsocialist Russia,” in Rickie Solinger and Mie Nakachi, eds., Reproductive States: Global Perspectives on the Invention and Implementation of Population Policy (Oxford, 2016), 290–328.

40. Blum, “Social History as the History of Measuring Populations: A Post-1987 Renewal,” 286; Blum, Rodit’sia, zhit’ i umeret’ v SSSR. Similar processes were occurring in Soviet sociology. In 1958, after several decades of a virtual non-existence, the Soviet Sociological Association was established because of a growing demand to represent the Soviet Union at international sociological conferences. Dmitry Kurakin, “The Sociology of Culture in the Soviet Union and Russia: The Missed Turn,” Cultural Sociology 11, no. 4 (December 2017): 394–415.

41. Helen Desfosses, Soviet Population Policy: Conflicts and Constraints.

42. It has been suggested that Urlanis’s intrepid behavior can be traced to his “freedom” from any official position in the Soviet academic and political establishment. A Jew, Urlanis was fired from his position in the Moscow State University in 1949 as part of Stalin’s campaign against cosmopolitanism. He never held a position in the Central Statistical Bureau or any other politically-sensitive department or laboratory. Vishnevskii, “Trudnoe vozrozhdenie demografii”; Vladimir Borisov and Anatolii Vishnevskii, “Boris Tsezarevich Urlanis, demograf,” Demoskop Weekly 31–32 (27 August–9 September, 2011), at http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/031/nauka01.php (last accessed December 20, 2018).

43. DiMaio, “Evolution of Soviet Population Thought.”; Murray Feshbach, “The Soviet Population Policy Debate: Actors and Issues” (Santa Monica, 1986), 15–16; Andrei G. Volkov, “Sushchestvuet li nauka ‘Demografiia’?” (Does Demography as Science Exist?), Demoskop Weekly, 41–42 (5–18 November, 2001), at http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/041/nauka01.php (last accessed December 20, 2018).

44. World Health Organization, Official Records of the World Health Organization, No. 151, “Nineteenth World Health Assembly, Geneva, May 3-20, 1966: Part I, Resolutions and Decisions Annexes,” (Geneva, August 1966), at http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/85788/1/Official_record151_eng.pdf (last accessed December 20, 2018).

45. Matthew James Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, Mass, 2008), 313.

46. DiMaio, “Evolution of Soviet Population Thought.”

47. Volkov, “Sushchestvuet li nauka ‘Demografiia’?”; Andrei G. Volkov, “My sdelali, chto smogli . . . ” (We Did What We Could . . .), Demoskop Weekly, 125–26 (8–21 September, 2003), at http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/2003/0125/nauka01.php (last accessed December 20, 2018).

48. Andrew Delano Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988).

49. Aron Ia. Boiarskii, “K voprosu o vzaimosviazi pokazatelei vosproizvodstva naseleniia” (On the Question of the Interactions between Different Indicators of Population Reproduction), in Vasilii S. Nemchinov, ed., Problemy demograficheskoii statistiki (The Problems of Demographic Statistics) (Moscow, 1959), 7–18; Boiarskii, “Demografia kak nauka.”

50. Valentina Belova and Leonid Darskii, Statistika mnenii v izuchenii rozhdaemosti (Polling Statistics in the Study of Fertility) (Moscow, 1972); Valentina Belova, Chislo detei v sem΄e (Children Parity in a Family) (Moscow, 1975); Valentina A. Belova, Galina A. Bondarskaia, and Leonid E. Darskii, “Dinamika i differentsiatsiia rozhdaemosti v SSSR” (The Dynamics and Differentiation of Birthrates in the USSR), Vestnik Statistiki 12 (1983): 14–24; Andrei G. Volkov, “Sem΄ia kak faktor izmeneniia demograficheskoi situatsii” (Family as a Factor in the Demographic Transformation), Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 1 (1981): 34–42; Andrei Volkov, ed., Faktory rozhdaemosti (Indicators of Fertility Trends) (Moscow, 1971); Galina A. Bondarskaia, Rozhdaemost΄ v SSSR (Etnodemograficheskii Aspekt) (Natality in the USSR [Ethno-Demographic Aspects]) (Moscow, 1977); Rosa I. Sifman, Dinamika rozhdaemosti v SSSR (the Dynamics of Birthrates in the USSR) (Moscow, 1974).

51. The Institute of Applied Social Research at the Soviet Academy of Sciences—institut konkretnykh sotsial΄nykh issledovanii—IKSI was renamed the Institute of Sociological Research—ISI in 1972 and Institute of Sociology in 1988. Other institutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, most notably, the Institute of Economics and its regional branches, also hosted demographers and scholars interested in demography from related disciplines, such as geography. Gennadii Osipov, “Vozrozhdenie sotsiologii v Rossii: Kak eto bylo na samom dele (The Resurgence of Sociology in Russia: How It Really Happened),” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 6 (2008): 5–22; Gennadii Batygin, ed., Rossiiskaia sotsiologiia shestidesiatykh godov v vospominaniiakh i dokumentakh (Russian Sociology in the 1960s: Memories and Documents) (St. Petersburg, 1999).

52. It was first established as the Laboratory for Population Research in 1965 (problemnaia laborotoriia po voprosam izucheniia narodonaseleniia na ekonomicheskom fakul΄tete MGU). In 1968, the Center for the Study of Population Problems was established in the same department (Tsentr po izucheniiu problem narodonaseleniia). Raisa S. Rotova and Maksim B. Denisenko, eds., D. I. Valentei v vospominaniiakh kolleg i uchenikov (D.I. Valentei as Remembered by His Colleagues and Students) (Moscow, 2006).

53. Feshbach, “The Soviet Population Policy Debate: Actors and Issues.”

54. Ibid., 12–40.

55. Sergey F. Ivanov, “Chetvert΄ veka spustia (Quarter of the Century Later),” in D. I. Valentei v vospominaniiakh kolleg i uchenikov, 14–18. It is possible that Murray Feshbach had had a direct impact on late Soviet demography, although I could not find any tangible evidence to prove this point.

56. Batygin, Rossiiskaia sotsiologiia shestidesiatykh godov v vospominaniiakh i dokumentakh, 118, 608.

57. Victor Perevedentzev, “O Probleme Rozhdaemosti i Demograficheskom Nevedenii (On the Problem of Fertility and Demographic Illiteracy),” Literaturnaia Gazeta, no. 95, August 13, 1966; Victor Perevedentzev, “Beregite drug druga! (Protect Each Other!),” Literaturnaia Gazeta, November 13, 1968; Boris Urlanis, “Beregite muzhchin! (Protect the Guys!),” Literaturnaia Gazeta, July 24, 1968.

58. Vishnevskii, “Trudnoe vozrozhdenie demografii,” 97.

59. Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park, 2004), 136–52.

60. Pugacheva, “Institut konkretnykh sotsial΄nykh issledovanii Akademii nauk SSSR (1968–1972)”; Kurakin, “The Sociology of Culture in the Soviet Union and Russia,” 402.

61. Vishnevskii, “Trudnoe vozrozhdenie demografii,” 96; Edvard Arab-Ogly, “‘Togda kazalos΄, chto koe-chtou udavalos΄ . . .” (We Were under Impression That Some Things Worked Well . . .) in Rossiiskaia sotsiologiia shestidesiatykh godov v vospominaniiakh i dokumentakh, 358–70.

62. Anatolii G. Vishnevskii and Igor S. Kon, eds., Brachnost΄, rozhdaemost΄, sem΄ia za tri veka (Novoe v zarubezhnoi demografii) (Nuptility, Fertility and Family over the Last Three Centuries) (Moscow, 1979); Andrei G. Volkov and Leonid E. Darskii, eds., Brak i sem΄ia. Demograficheskii aspekt (Novoe v zarubezhnoi demografii) (Marriage and Family. A Demographic Perspective [New in Foreign Demography]) (Moscow, 1975), and Razvod. Demograficheskii Aspekt (Novoe v zarubezhnoi demografii) (Divorce: A Demographic Perspective. [New in Foreign Demography]) (Moscow, 1979).

63. Aron Ia. Boiarskii, “K probleme demograficheskogo optimuma (On the Theory of Population Optimum),” in Andrei G. Volkov, ed., Izuchenie vosproizvodstva naseleniia (Studies in Population Reproduction) (Moscow, 1968), 48.

64. Aron Ia. Boiarskii, “K probleme naseleniia (On the Question of Population),” in Naselenie i metody ego izucheniia, 76.

65. Valery Elizarov, “Demograf s bol΄shoi bukvy (A Demographer with a Capital D),” in Razvitie naseleniia i demograficheskaia politika. Pamiati A.Ya. Kvashi, 38–39; Alexander Ia. Kvasha, “Problemy demograficheskogo optimuma (The Problems of Optimum Population),” in Dmitrii I. Valentei, ed., Narodonaselenie (Population) (Moscow, 1973), 13–26.

66. In the 1970s, a growing number of Marxist demographers in the west placed proletarianization at the center of their analysis, which they perceived as a protracted and uneven demographic revolution that began in the eighteenth century—two hundred years prior to the formation of the proletariat—with the rise of a mass of rural landless laborers. See, for example, Wally Seccombe, “Marxism and Demography,” New Left Review, no. 137 (January 1983): 25–28. This development was not however at the forefront of Soviet demographic research.

67. Valerii Elizarov, “Model’ upravleniia reproduktivnym povedeniem sem΄i (The Model for the Regulation of Family’s Reproductive Behavior),” in D. I. Valentei, ed., Upravlenie demograficheskimi protsessami (The Regulation of Demographic Processes) (Moscow, 1980), 89–103; Mikhail Matskovskii, “Demograficheskoe povedenie (Demographic Behavior),” in D. I. Valentei, ed., Demograficheskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar΄ (Moscow, 1985); Andrei G. Volkov, Sem΄ia—ob΄΄ekt demografii (Moscow, 1986).

68. Frank W. Notestein, “Population-The Long View,” in Theodore Schultz, ed. Food for the World (Chicago, 1945), 36–57; Kingsley Davis, “The World Demographic Transition,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 237 (January 1945): 1–11. John Sharpless, “Population Science, Private Foundations, and Development Aid: The Transformation of Demographic Knowledge in the United States, 1945–1965,” in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley, 1997), 176–200.

69. Alexander Ya. Kvasha, “Etapy demograficheskogo razvitiia SSSR (The Demographic Development in the USSR),” in Faktory rozhdaemosti, 77–87; Anatolii Vishnevskii, “Demograficheskaia revolutsiia i budushchee rozhdaemosti i smertnosti v SSSR (The Demographic Revolution and The Future Trends of Fertility and Mortality in the USSR),” in Dmitrii Valentei, ed. Nashe budushchee glazami demografa (Our Future in the Eyes of the Demographer) (Moscow, 1979), 27–43; Vladimir Borisov, Perspektivy rozhdaemosti (The Perspectives on Fertility Trends) (Moscow, 1976).

70. Volkov, Faktory rozhdaemosti (Indicators of Fertility Trends).

71. Galina A. Bondarskaia, “Vliianie etnicheskogo faktora na uroven΄ rozhdaemosti v SSSR i v nekotorykh sotsialisticheskikh stranakh Evropy (The Effects of Ethnic Factors on Birthrates in the USSR and Several Socialist Countries in Europe),” in Volkov, Faktory rozhdaemosti, 52–62; Galina A. Bondarskya and Viktor I. Kozlov, “Natsional’nyi sostav naseleniia kak faktor differentsiatsii rozhdaemosti (Nationality as a Differentiating Factor),” in Volkov, Faktory rozhdaemosti, 63–76; Galina A. Bondarskaia, “Etnicheskaia differentsiatsiia rozhdaemosti v SSSR i ee sushchnost΄ (Ethnic Differentiation of Fertility in the USSR and Its Essence),” in Leonid E. Darskii, ed., Rozhdaemost΄, (Moscow, 1976), 106–20. It is notable that despite their explicit focus on women’s role in family reproduction, these studies were based on a shared ideological and welfare model of women as active participants in the labor market.

72. Andrei G. Volkov, “O neobkhodimosti vozdeistviia na rozhdaemost΄ (On the Necessity of Regulating Fertility),” in Darskii, Rozhdaemost΄, 35–61; Volkov, Sem΄ia—ob΄΄ekt demografii.

73. Kvasha, “Problemy demograficheskogo optimuma (The Problems of Optimum Population)”; Dmitrii Valentei, ed., Upravlenie demograficheskimi protsessami (The Regulation of Demographic Processes] (Moscow, 1980); Dmitrii Valentei and Anatolii Sudoplatov, eds., Problemy narodonaseleniia. sovremennaia demograficheskaia situatsiia v razvivaushchikhsia stranakh (Population Problems. A Contemporary Demographic Situation in Developing Countries) (Moscow, 1982); Boris Urlanis, Problemy dinamiki naseleniia SSSR (The Problems of the Population Dynamics in the USSR) (Moscow, 1974), 108.

74. Volkov, “O neobkhodimosti vozdeistviia na rozhdaemost΄.”

75. Volkov, Sem΄ia—ob΄΄ekt demografii, 248.

76. Cited in Desfosses, Soviet Population Policy: Conflicts and Constraints, 115.

77. Natalia Zvereva, “Ob΄΄ektivnaia neobkhodimost΄ planomernovo upravleniia razvitiem narodonaseleniia pri sotsializme (The Objective Necessity of the Planned Regulation of the Socialist Population Development),” in D. I. Valentei, ed., Upravlenie demograficheskimi protsessami (The Regulation of Demographic Processes) (Moscow, 1980), 20.

78. Anatolii Sudoplatov, “Politicheskie kulisy razvitiia demografii v MGU (Behind the Political Curtains of Demography Development at Moscow State University),” in D.I. Valentei v vospominaniiakh kolleg i uchenikov, 6–14.

79. Avdeyeva, “Policy Experiment in Russia.”

80. Bondarskaia and Kozlov, “Natsional΄nyi sostav naseleniia kak faktor differentsiatsii rozhdaemosti (Nationality as a Differentiating Factor of Reproduction)”; Rosa I. Sifman, Dinamika rozhdaemosti v SSSR.

81. Boris Urlanis, “Demograficheskaia politika v sovremennom mire (Demographic Policies in the Contemporary World),” Mirovaia ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia (World Economy and International Relations) 5 (1975): 106–12; Galina I. Litvinova, Pravo i demograficheskiie protsessy v SSSR (Law and Demographic Processes in the USSR) (Moscow, 1981).

82. Galina I. Litvinova, “Nado li povyshat΄ rozhdaemost΄? (Is it Necessary to Raise Birthrates?),” in Svet i teni progressa (Sozial΄no-demograficheskiie problemy SSSR) (Lights and Shadows of Progress [Socio-Demographic Problems in the USSR]) (Moscow, 1989), 63–142.

83. KPSS, “Materialy XXVII s΄΄ezda partii sovetskogo soiuza (Materials from the XXVII Soviet Union’s Party Congress),” 273.

84. Anatolii Vishnevskii, “Demograficheskaia revolutsiia” (Demographic Revolution), in Izbrannye demograficheskie trudy: Demograficheskaia teoriia i demograficheskaia istoriia, vol. I (Selected Publications in Demography: Demographic Theory and Demographic History) (Moscow, 2005, 5–214).

85. Ibid.

86. Michele Rivkin-Fish, “Anthropology, Demography, and the Search for a Critical Analysis of Fertility: Insights from Russia,” American Anthropologist 105, no. 2 (June 2003): 289–301.

87. Vishnevskii, “Demograficheskaia revolutsiia i budushchee rozhdaemosti i smertnosti v SSSR (The Demographic Revolution and Future Trends of Fertility and Mortality in the USSR),” 30; Vishnevskii, Rossiia pered demographicheskim vyborom; Zakharov, Sergei, “Russian Federation: From the First to Second Demographic Transition,” Demographic Research 19 (July 2008): 907–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88. Vishnevskii, Rossiia pered demographicheskim vyborom.

89. Antonov, Anatolii, Sotsiologiia rozhdaemosti (Sociology of Fertility) (Moscow, 1980)Google Scholar.

90. See: Rivkin-Fish, “Pronatalism, Gender Politics, and the Renewal of Family Support in Russia.” Both also share the understanding of Russia’s population decline as a geopolitical and economic burden that works against Russia’s position within the “global demographic hierarchy.” This, in turn, prevents Russia from competing with the rapid pace of population growth in developing countries. Antonov, Anatolii and Borisov, Vladimir, Dinamika naseleniia Rossii v XXI veke i prioritety demograficheskoi politiki (Moscow, 2006), 5Google Scholar; Vishnevskii, Rossia pered demographicheskim vyborom, 44–45.

91. Antonov, Sotsiologiia rozhdaemosti; Antonov, Mikrosotsiologiia sem΄i (Moscow, 2005); Antonov, “Demograficheskaia i semeinaia politika: Zabluzhdenia, mifi i istina”; Antonov, Medkov, and Arkhangelsky, Demograficheskie processi v Rossii XXI Veka.

92. Antonov, Mikrosotsiologiia sem΄i. Some of these ideas were expressed by Vladimir Putin in his 2019 address to the Federal Assembly, at http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59863 (last accessed March 4, 2019).

93. Anatolii Antonov, interview, Moscow, June 23, 2008.

94. Ibid.

95. Rivkin-Fish, “Anthropology, Demography, and the Search for a Critical Analysis of Fertility,” and “Pronatalism, Gender Politics, and the Renewal of Family Support in Russia.”

96. Anatolii Antonov, interview, Moscow, June 23, 2008.

97. Greenhalgh, Susan, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China (Berkeley, 2008), 320CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dean, “The Malthus Effect.”

98. Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism.