BERLIN — What the Kremlin wants from Russians now boils down to two things.
Men should join the army.
Women should have more children.
In recent months, the Russian government has doubled sign-up bonuses for contract soldiers and blanketed the airwaves, social media and city streets with recruitment ads. And a new law allows criminal suspects to avoid trial if they sign up to fight.
At the same time, President Vladimir Putin has decreed that increasing births is a national priority, an effort that entered a newly repressive phase last week with a bill that would outlaw any advocacy for a child-free lifestyle.
The two campaigns are separate, but in wartime Russia, they are also two sides of the same coin: the Kremlin’s increasingly aggressive attempt to enlist regular Russians in reshaping their country to prevail over the West.
For the short term, Putin’s army needs more soldiers. It is suffering 1,000 casualties a day, by Western estimates, in a war of attrition in Ukraine that shows no sign of ending.
And for the long term, in Putin’s view, Russia needs more people — to underpin an economy increasingly isolated from the West, to reduce the country’s reliance on immigration, and, of course, to provide the recruitment pool for any future wars.
In Putin’s thinking, “The body is turning into a public good,” said Andrey Makarychev, a professor at the University of Tartu in Estonia who studies the relationship between the state and people’s bodies. “A woman’s body is a producer of children, and a man’s body is the ability to pull the trigger and, in the end, to kill.”
Last month, Putin ordered the ranks of Russia’s military to be increased by 180,000 service members to 1.5 million — a number that would make it the second-largest in the world after China’s. The Kremlin tied the increase to the “number of threats that exist for our country.”
But analysts say that standing up an army of 1.5 million is unrealistic — in large part because of Russia’s shrinking population. Dara Massicot, an expert on the Russian military at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues that Russia’s challenge will not only be to recruit new soldiers, but also to have a labor force big enough to churn out the weapons and equipment that such a huge army would need.
The matter is clearly on Putin’s mind. At a conference in the Pacific coast city of Vladivostok last month, Putin praised “our men” for, he claimed, signing up for the military in “exponentially” increasing numbers. But when it came to birthrates, the Russian leader saw some room for improvement.
“It is necessary to take care of the population, to increase the fertility rate,” he said, “to make it fashionable to have many children, as it used to be in Russia in the past — seven, nine, 10 people in families.”
Economists and demographers have long highlighted Russia’s shrinking population as a major challenge. In large part it’s a legacy of the collapse in the birthrate amid the chaos and poverty that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union; a generation later, there are far fewer women of childbearing age.
Putin has long spoken of the need to address the problem. But after his invasion of Ukraine, and especially in the last year, the issue appears to have become a fixation for him.
In one televised meeting, he tut-tutted to the governor of Volgograd, in the southwest, that fertility there “has decreased twice as much as the national average.”
“Twice really is a bit much,” Putin said.
“We’re working on this task, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” the governor, Andrei Bocharov, responded, referring to the president by his patronymic.
In May, Putin declared a key government goal to be the increase of Russia’s total fertility rate — a measure for the number of children the average woman has in her lifetime — setting targets of 1.6 in 2030 and 1.8 in 2036. The rate was 1.41 in Russia last year, compared with 1.62 in the United States.
The number of children reported born in Russia in the first half of this year, 599,630, was the lowest in a quarter century; overall, including occupied Crimea, the population has declined by 1.8 million since 2020 to 146.1 million.
As it has with military recruitment, the Kremlin is using financial rewards to incentivize births. Russian women having their first child get a one-time payout of $6,700. On Monday, when the Russian government announced its budget for the next three years, it touted more than $60 billion in planned spending to support pregnant women and families with children.
Government measures to increase the population are not unusual in a world in which many countries are battling declining birthrates. Russia’s fertility rate is on par with European countries like Portugal and Greece.
But Russian officials are increasingly conflating those efforts with their conflict with the West and their portrayal of Russia as a conservative bastion. Some have called for a “special demographic operation” to increase births, an echo of the Kremlin’s euphemism for its invasion of Ukraine, the “special military operation.”
Valentina Matviyenko, the head of the upper house of parliament and perhaps the most powerful woman in Russia’s nearly all-male ruling class, said that Western feminism had become “a movement against men, against traditional values.”
Last week, lawmakers introduced a bill that would “prohibit the propaganda of the conscious refusal to have children” with fines as high as $50,000. Lawyers warned the bill was so ambiguous that social-media posts about postpartum depression could become illegal. But the Kremlin signaled its approval.
“A united and big family is the foundation of a strong state,” Vyacheslav Volodin, the head of the lower house of parliament, wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
The importance of population size to Putin’s geopolitics has become clear in his war against Ukraine, which has about three times fewer people than Russia. Analysts believe that Russia has largely managed to offset its dead and wounded — which Western officials estimate in the hundreds of thousands — with new recruits, while grinding down Ukraine’s force using superior numbers.
Even though the most willing volunteers have already gone off to war, the Kremlin still appears intent on avoiding a forced mobilization of civilians like the one that spurred an exodus of young men in the fall of 2022.
In July, Putin signed a decree doubling sign-up bonuses to more than $4,500, almost half the average annual salary for Russians. The city of Moscow, where the recruitment campaign was long muted to shield the city’s middle class from the sacrifices of the war, introduced its own bonus of more than $20,000 on top of that.
Recruitment stands have popped up in the Moscow subway, according to Muscovites and social media posts from the city. Ads tout tax breaks, university tuition subsidies and discounts on utility payments for contract soldiers.
On Wednesday, Putin signed a law creating yet another incentive: people charged with a crime will be allowed to avoid trial and a possible sentence by signing up for military service.
Massicot, the military analyst, said that for all of Russia’s demographic challenges, the country’s size means “they are in a better place than the Ukrainians are right now” when it comes to manning the front lines.
For the moment, it’s the drive for more soldiers that seems to be the government’s priority when it comes to enlisting regular Russians in Putin’s aims. Women across the country said in interviews and text messages that they had noticed more ads and recruitment stands for the military recently, but were skeptical of the state’s embrace of larger families.
Moscow officials are “in their own universe, thinking that traditional families are like elves or something,” said Arina, 33, who just had her second child in the southern region of North Ossetia. Providing only her first name for fear of retribution, she added: “We — regular traditional families — just live in a different reality.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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