Everybody knew of the labour camps and that was enough of a deterrent. Artists painted pictures glorifying Stalin and he dominated many pictures. It was not unusual for Stalin to be in a white suit so that he stood out from the crowd. Those who wrote poems and novels had to do the same — write about Stalin in a manner which gloried him. Some artists and authors were so depressed by all this that they committed suicide rather than do what the state ordered them to do.
Many others tried to leave the country. Education was strictly controlled by the state. In , a rigid programme of discipline and education was introduced. Exams, banned under Lenin , were reintroduced. Outside of school, children were expected to join youth organisations such as the Octobrists for 8 to 10 year olds and the Pioneers for the 10 to 16 year olds. From 19 to 23 you were expected to join the Komsomol.
Among other things, divorce was made a lot more easy under Lenin. This is why he drives. In Soviet propaganda, this direction is indicated by the leader who may be driving a train down the railroad tracks, pointing or gazing and the citizenry are duty-bound to follow him because no other way is correct or acceptable. Jeffrey Brooks points out that, although this metaphor was frequently used by Lenin, it is not borrowed from Marx and Engels, who employed vaguer metaphors for development and growth.
The notion of Stalin as the architect of Soviet communism dates to the time of the burgeoning of the Stalin cult in After signing a document capitulating to Stalin in , 85 Radek was readmitted to the Party in and went on to lead Cominform and deliver a keynote address at the Writers Conference of He was arrested in the purges of and subsequently died in the gulag during a sentence of 10 years hard labour.
Radek argues that Stalin, rather than Lenin, was the architect of socialism. When Radek wrote in , the Congress of Victors had just declared the full achievement of socialism and the new task of progressing to the higher stage, communism, had commenced.
By the time the two posters celebrating Stalin as the architect of communism appeared, Stalin was an old man, already over 70, and the quest to introduce a communist society had been taking place for 17 years, complicated by the need for defence in the Great Patriotic War. Behind Stalin, bathed in a white glow that appears to emanate from him, is the new hydroelectric work being undertaken across the Soviet territories.
There are two groups of figures in the poster, both existing only in order to react and illustrate for the viewer the correct attitude to take to Stalin. The group of men on the left, who appear to be professional workers associated with bringing the communist dream to fruition, stare up at Stalin with awe and respect. In the bottom-right corner, passers-by on a barge hail Stalin with visible enthusiasm. By focusing on Stalin, the other figures demonstrate that it is Stalin who embodies the communist future.
Like a priest or shaman, Stalin acts as a sort of intermediary between the vision and the people. The second poster, by N. Petrov and Konstantin Ivanov Fig. This poster uses black-and-white photography as a means of documentary evidence of the progress of Soviet society.
Stalin is superimposed in front of a view of Moscow and is looking up the Volga River. The city appears to be bustling with pedestrians, cars and river traffic, and is bathed in a white light which also shines on Stalin from above. The poster plays on the two levels of meaning of the architect symbol. Stalin is literally shown as responsible for the planning and rebuilding of Moscow, which commenced in , but also responsible for planning and building the new communist society.
Moscow was seen as a symbol for the whole federation, her transformation a metaphor for the moral and political transformation of the whole of Soviet society. Katerina Clark points out that, although only parts of Moscow were rebuilt, it was usually represented as being totally rebuilt, and photographs of models were often presented as in the case of the Palace of Soviets as if the new buildings already existed.
The Stalin cult made use of a number of symbols and archetypes to demonstrate the many facets of the leader and his relationship to the people, which in turn served as a model for both the new Soviet person and the new society. Two of the most pervasive and fundamental archetypes associated with Stalin are those of the Father and the Teacher.
These archetypes are distinct, but closely related, as both involve notions of responsibility, care and mentoring relationships, but only the Father archetype implies kinship between participants.
It is here that the relationship between the leader and his people enters the realm of myth and also, it may be argued, that the deepest realms of the unconscious are tapped by cult propaganda. Before investigating how the Father and Teacher archetypes manifested in the cult of Stalin, it is necessary to briefly examine the nature of Soviet society and how these archetypes tapped into systems of reciprocal obligation already in existence.
These terms refer to an economic system whereby the citizenry receives ordinary goods and services as gifts from the leadership. In capitalism, those who run lemonade stands endeavour to serve thirsty customers in ways that make a profit and outcompete other lemonade stand owners.
In socialism, the point was not profit, but the relationship between thirsty persons and the one with the lemonade — the Party center, which appropriated from producers the various ingredients lemons, sugar, water and then mixed the lemonade to reward them with, as it saw fit. Verdery goes on to point out that goods produced in the socialist countries were either gathered and held centrally, or almost given away to sections of the population at low prices. The socialist contract guaranteed food and clothing, but not quality, availability or choice, and the goods produced often could not compete on world markets with goods produced in capitalist countries.
The point was not to sell the goods, but to control redistribution, because that was how the leadership confirmed its legitimacy with the public. In song, film, theatre and posters, Stalin was promoted as the benefactor of all society. All bounty came from Stalin in his role as head of state. While in numerous ways the cult of Lenin formed a prototype for the cult of Stalin, the two cults differed in one important respect. By the mids, Stalin had become a symbol for the Party, with the two entities synonymous, so that expressing gratitude to Stalin which was easier than directing gratitude to a faceless entity was equivalent to giving thanks to the Party and the state.
The gift of care, guidance and leadership from a benevolent Stalin to a grateful populace formed a central theme of Stalinist propaganda. By definition, gifts come without strings attached although, in practice, as Marcel Mauss points out, there is almost always a reciprocal obligation, and what separates the gift from economic transactions is the unspecified time delay between the two events.
The reciprocal obligation owed to Stalin for his bountiful gifts took the form of spontaneous and extravagant displays of gratitude. They were held in schools, and also as part of other important occasions, such as the opening of Party congresses and the celebrations for the anniversary of the October Revolution. Russian traditions of bribery, official favours and even the Orthodox gift of the sacraments, through which the believer can attain eternal life, all contributed to a culture of obligation.
In addition to the official state-controlled economy, a second economy coexisted during Soviet times, which grew directly from the culture of gift giving. Three points are crucial in understanding blat — the first is that, as there was no private ownership of anything, everything must be accessed through the state and state officials. The second point is that, although the transactions involved the misappropriation and misdirection of collectively owned property, blat did not tend to refer to incidents of outright bribery, which were seen as separate and usually criminal acts.
Blat involved social networks and relationships, and the extending of favours, often separated in time, so that they took on the quality of reciprocal gift giving. The third point is that this second economy of blat was dependent on the official economy, which controlled the means of production, and was the source of all goods and services. If one had eliminated the state-controlled economy, rather than flourishing with opportunities for capitalist entrepreneurship, the second economy would have died.
Blat was all pervasive because it was necessary for survival, and Soviet society consisted of vast networks of patronage that ran both vertically and horizontally.
Notions of gift giving, obligation, bounty, reciprocity, and even mentorship, were integral to Soviet life, and Stalin merely sat at the top of the pyramid, as the ultimate dispenser of goods and benefits to a network below. These networks of patronage were reinforced by the strong familial connections among the top Bolsheviks. Entire family clans held leadership positions, and intermarried with each other in tight-knit circles.
The use of archetypes to formalise and give expression to these concepts not only served to create the appearance of the existence of a long tradition in the fledgling regime, but enabled the populace to embrace their leader in a manner to which they were already accustomed, at both the conscious and subconscious level.
Stalin was not only the source of all bounty, but also the source of all accomplishments. One of the ways in which the sense of obligation was reinforced in Soviet society was through the use of propaganda centred specifically around the theme of thanking and benefaction.
Posters that highlight the debt owed to Stalin for a happy childhood, and posters that highlight the debt owed by women for their new equality in society to Stalin and the Party usually engage the Father archetype in relation to Stalin, as discussed below.
When examining the archetypes associated with Stalin, it is important to remember that it is only rarely that Stalin is seen to embody only one archetype in any given poster. He is often representing at least two, and sometimes more. As noted earlier, this can lead to a somewhat confusing blend of images and symbols which occasionally attempt clumsy reconciliations of traits that are essentially irreconcilable.
It also means that attempts to separate out posters as representing particular archetypes are somewhat problematic. While the key archetypes will be addressed separately in this study for ease of interpretation, it must always be borne in mind that there is often considerable overlap between archetypal identities, and also some fairly transparent contradictions.
The major archetype associated with Stalin was that of Otets Narodov , the father of the people. The party is orphaned. As Tumarkin observes, Lenin repeatedly spoke of Soviet Russia in terms which suggested it was a child in need of care and nurturing. This is a time of the dictatorship of the proletariat as led by the vanguard party, where not everyone is equal, nor entitled to the benefits of socialist citizenship. Trotskii names Lenin as the father of the Party and the working class.
By extension, once class conflict had been eliminated and socialism achieved, Lenin too could be seen as a founding father of the whole nation. The notion of the powerful male leader as a father to his people is widespread and, as David Hoffmann points out, even in Britain in the 20th century, the king was depicted as the father of the people with the nation taking on a female persona as a motherland, and compatriots seen as brothers and sisters.
In Stalinist society, particular emphasis was laid on the civic duty of parents to correctly educate their children in the spirit of communism, even instilling in them a willingness to lay down their lives for their country.
This is particularly important in a regime like that of Soviet Russia, where the traditional father, the tsar, had been overthrown, and a power vacuum existed. The father figure must be rapidly replaced and re-established to prevent chaos. Viewing Lenin and Stalin as fathers of the people had a further dimension. For a child, a parent has always existed and atemporality is a feature of both the cult of Lenin and the cult of Stalin. Lenin lives! Lenin will live! The use of the Father archetype in depictions of the leader enables the symbolic persona to convey both authority and benevolence simultaneously, as well as inherently encapsulating the notion of a reciprocal relationship of rights and obligations.
One of the most interesting ways in which this is manifested is in the propaganda posters on the theme of the happy childhood. These posters show happy, well-fed children in joyous mood, expressing their gratitude to the man responsible, the fatherly figure of Stalin. As Catriona Kelly observes:.
Happiness in Soviet terms did not refer to the emotional state of the individual or to the pursuit of individual fulfilment. Happiness, like everything else, was conceived of as a collective principle. Nadezhda Mandelstam recounts:. Everybody seemed intent on his daily round and went smilingly about the business of carrying out his instructions. This nobody could afford to admit — if you were afraid, then you must have a bad conscience.
The cookies will be packaged in beautifully designed boxes. In the background, children play in miniature cars and on scooters, watched by their mother, who is of secondary importance after Stalin. Other boys hold model ships and aeroplanes, while the girls are passive and express gratitude by gesture, and by the gift of flowers. The colour palette is mostly muted and pastel red, green and white — the colours of festivity, which emphasises the relaxed and idyllic nature of the scene.
Though happy and relaxed, the children are also orderly. From the mids onwards, the ideal Soviet child was consistently depicted as obedient and grateful. The portrait format of the poster emphasises the intimacy and physical closeness of the scene, which is reminiscent of a family home. By depicting such a scene, with Stalin standing in as the father for non-related children, the suggestion is made that he is the father of all children of all nationalities of the USSR, intimately concerned with the prospects and fate of each child in his care.
Stalin holds the smallest child against his chest, while his focus is keenly on the elder boy who plays the violin for him. The youngest boy shows ambition to join the armed forces, wearing military garb and clutching a toy aeroplane in his right arm. The older boy wears a Pioneer scarf and will be a successful musician. It is only the young girl, wearing traditional headdress, who is given no costume or prop to indicate her future vocation. Perhaps her gratitude and devotion are a sufficient contribution.
The caption of the poster, which is in Ukrainian and occupies the bottom third of the poster, reinforces this notion of gratitude, and is uncommon for its time in that it emphasises the thanks owed to the Party, as well as to Stalin.
The word ridnomu and its Russian equivalent rodnomu does not translate precisely in English. Used as a term of endearment, the word also connotes a kin or familial relationship with the person to whom it is applied. Significantly in this poster, the action takes place in front of a New Year tree, which had been banned since , but was reinstated in The model aeroplane and ship are typical Soviet toys, inspiring boys to emulate Soviet heroes in aviation and exploration.
Stalin is not only providing a happy childhood, but also offers the children the potential for happy and fulfilling futures. In the poster, Stalin is surrounded by fair-haired Russian children who are situated on the same level in the picture plane as he although, by virtue of his status as adult male, he looks down on the children protectively.
The scene is relaxed and informal, with four of the children gazing up at Stalin with affection while a fifth child has his back turned to Stalin and gazes directly at the viewer.
The implication is that a Soviet childhood is a time of sacred innocence, unbounded joy, and material plenitude the flowers in the bottom right-hand corner are a further indication of material wealth. As the slogan suggests, all of these things are provided by the dominating paternal presence of Stalin, who is, by association, a kind of secular Father Christmas.
In —36, Stalin began to appear with children more frequently in newspaper photographs. Plamper dates the launch of the image of Stalin as father to a newspaper article in in which he appeared with year-old Pioneer Nina Zdrogova on the tribune of the Lenin Mausoleum, saluting a physical—cultural parade. One of these newspaper photographs, V. It even appeared in a later propaganda poster as an icon.
As well as surrounding himself with children, Stalin also surrounded himself with flowers, both in photographs and posters. Flowers had formed a part of the personality cults of Aleksandr Kerenskii and General Lavr Kornilov in , however, after the October Revolution flowers disappeared from political life, as they were not consistent with the severe and sparse style of early Bolshevism and its ascetic idealism. Flowers re-emerged onto the public arena in the mids, even showing up in military parades, and became a constant presence in propaganda posters until the Great Patriotic War.
Flowers symbolise celebration, festivity, fertility and abundance. The use of flowers as symbols in Stalinist political posters embraced many of these traditional associations, as well as reinforcing the ritual that was becoming canonical.
Flowers enhance the atmosphere of celebration and signify a rite of passage — a meeting with Stalin was a special milestone in the life of these select, fortunate children. The giving of flowers is a gesture of tribute and thanks to someone who has served or protected you. Flowers highlight the lush abundance of the imminent socialist utopia, which is already manifesting in the joyous lives led by these children. If Stalin took on the role of the great Father, wedded to the Soviet motherland, flowers and children symbolised the fertility of this union.
David Brandenberger notes that, before in Soviet Russia, the word rodina had been used only to refer to ethnically homogenous home territories. As of , Stalin began to continually insert the word rodina into slogans for press publications when referring to the Soviet Union as a whole. In earlier posters the children occupied the same space in the picture plane as Stalin, but now he is geographically isolated from them — nominally, away at the Kremlin, but in fact floating above them in the sky, looking down on them like an omnipotent god.
There is no sky, only light as in an icon and the sacred spire of the Spassky tower, topped by its red star, stands like the steeple of a church bathed in fairytale light. The Kremlin is the earthly home of the benign deity and in the poster forms a link between the realms of the heavens inhabited by Stalin and earth inhabited by the children.
The children bring lush bunches of flowers but these remain symbolic offerings which will not actually reach Stalin. While the children salute and gaze with reverential awe, Stalin looks down on them as a symbolic father, offering protection and benefaction and radiating white light across the various lands and territories of the union.
Visually, he was portrayed in posters as leading the people into battle, and I have located only one poster of the early war years in which he is referred to as father. The family gather instead around a portrait of Stalin who, in this early version of the poster, is not wearing insignia of rank and looks humble and approachable. Stalin is also referred to as a father and apparent husband of Lenin in a poster by Vladimir Fedotov Fig. This curious poster, produced on cheap paper without details of place of publication or size of edition, celebrates 25 years of the Komsomol, although the poster image itself is about the war effort.
In the poster caption, a verse by Kazimir Lisovskii, Lenin takes on the maternal qualities of love and nurturing, while Stalin adopts the role of the father and raises the Komsomol generation — these are not children, but young people of fighting age. The young woman who cares for the child comforts it with her right hand while the left hand is raised in a gesture which suggests both protection and blessing.
She represents the motherland, the manifestation of the caring Soviet state. It is interesting to compare the Ivanov poster with the poster by Vatolina, Denisov, Pravdin and Pravdina. Both are set amid New Year celebrations and feature a New Year tree.
In the earlier poster, Stalin is physically present in the scene, a benefactor and bestower of gifts. His interactions with the children are familiar and paternal. The New Year tree is hung with baubles that predict the fulfilling futures offered to the children. In the later poster Stalin is present only as a portrait on which the child gazes in rapture. The small portion of the tree that is visible carries red stars as decorations, but none of the other earlier portents of the happy future, and is adorned with tinsel, traditional baubles, a candy cane, a fish and a rabbit, suggesting abundance.
The child is alone in this poster, without siblings, peers or parents. Perhaps the child is an orphan. Stalin stands in for the absent father, but here, as in the Zhukov poster, he is a remote presence and his relationship with the child is anything but familiar. With the war years behind the Soviet Union, there was a rapid return to the notion of thanking Stalin for a happy childhood. This increasing remoteness was paralleled in journalistic and literary texts which featured less frequent opportunities for children to have direct contact with Stalin, and emphasised more contacts in remote or mediated forms, such as receiving a letter or telegram from Stalin.
A grey-haired Stalin appears in military uniform, standing on a podium. Although he touches the arm of the young Pioneer boy, he is separated in the picture plane from the two children and elevated above them.
The girl carries a bunch of flowers to give to Stalin, but holds it off to the side, reaching up to touch Stalin with her right hand, as one might touch a holy icon. A huge bunch of red roses forms a barrier between them and the girl cannot reach him. The figure of Stalin floats in an undifferentiated background of pure light, which illuminates the face of the boy.
In the and posters, children are relaxed and celebrating, not all of them look at Stalin and where they do look at him, it is with friendship and affection, from within the same space. Frequently, one of the children engages the viewer by looking directly out from the image. In the later posters, the children have diminished in number and importance and are restrained and respectful. In a happy childhood consists entirely in being loyal and dutybound to Stalin. As Stalin is portrayed wearing military uniform, the formality of the occasion is reinforced, and the viewer is also reminded that all citizens owe Stalin a debt of gratitude for victory in the war.
Glory to great Stalin! Stalin appears as a giant portrait hanging behind rows of unified, obedient children, who salute, wave flags and appear to be engaged in an oath-taking ceremony. The Soviet regime bound children to Stalin by the taking of oaths of allegiance and duty at initiation ceremonies into the Pioneers and Komsomol, and posters such as this reinforced the sense of obligation the children owed their leader.
It is interesting to note that this is one of the relatively few posters of this era in which Stalin does not appear in military uniform. There is no interaction as Stalin looks out into the distance and the children have their backs turned to him. Neither the Warrior nor the Father archetype is being emphasised here. By depicting Stalin increasingly as a mythical and iconic figure, children were further encouraged to an attitude of unquestioning obedience and spiritual faith that filled the vacuum left by the suppression of the Orthodox religion in Soviet society.
With increasing emphasis on family values in Soviet society from the mids, even the lessons to be drawn from the cult of Pavlik Morozov were subtly repackaged, with the emphasis shifting away from the denunciation of his parents, and moving to his obedience and hard work as a school pupil. Obedient and faithful children not only served as models for appropriate adult behaviour, but were expected to re-educate their parents according to the new ways. This ongoing re-education campaign to model new relationships in a new society employed the methodology of socialist realism across all genres of artistic production.
Additionally, sons had not undergone the sorts of trials and suffering experienced by the fathers. As Clark points out, the sons did not move up to the status of fathers, remaining permanently indebted to and under the authoritative guidance of the father figures. As already noted, in Soviet propaganda Stalin was not only the provider of all bounty to citizens of the Soviet Union, nor simply the benefactor of humankind.
He was also the central facilitator of all motion, and the source of all achievement. Every accomplishment by any Soviet citizen reflected back on Stalin, who was an inspiration and muse to all. The notion of individual accomplishment due to exceptional personal abilities did not fit with a Marxist—Leninist view of history, which stressed that individuals were only able to accomplish great feats because they recognised the nature and significance of revolutionary times and were able to act in accordance with circumstances.
Stalin was effusively credited with not only facilitating all of the successes of the Soviet Union, but with such apparently miraculous abilities as keeping his aviators and polar explorers warm against the Arctic cold. With the modernization of the banking system and the work environment, women can now have their own bank accounts and credit cards, which provides increased financial independence. Women no longer feel required to work outside the home.
They feel free to make their own decisions about home and a career and can choose the way of life they prefer. However, in provincial Russia and even among some high-income social groups in the major cities, the more traditional view of the role of women is still popular—men should provide for their families, but if women work, anything they earn can be spent for their own needs. Despite changes that have given women more independence and choices, the traditional views of men and women—men should be masculine breadwinners and women should be feminine and responsible for child-rearing—prevails across much of Russian society.
Such views are reinforced by age-old institutions like the Russian Orthodox Church. During the height of the coronavirus, a Russian Orthodox official advised Russian women not to reprimand their husbands during the lockdown to avoid domestic conflict, and if they did, they should punish themselves for doing so. Although there is discussion underway to reimpose criminal punishment for this crime, the coronavirus has delayed the work of the legislature.
Attitudes toward children have also changed. Grandmothers were largely responsible for raising the children while the parents were at work. As children grew older, parents were more influential in selecting their future path. Even after they got married, children frequently remained dependent on their parents because housing was scarce, and they were often unable to find separate living accommodations.
That has changed. Most young people now live very different lives. Parents have less influence on their children, and children are freer to make their own choices and pursue the lives they want.
Housing in most parts of Russia is no longer scarce and has been privatized. Young people, like everyone else, have access to mortgages and credit cards and are therefore able to live independently from their parents when they reach adulthood. One of the more noticeable changes from the Soviet system is access to statistical information.
The official Russian state statistical agency Rosstat frequently publishes data about various aspects of life in Russia, but because Rosstat is a government body, its data are considered by some to be suspect. There are also several independent polling organizations whose work varies in accuracy and reliability. The best known and most reliable of them is the Levada Center. Despite the dedication of the pollsters, there is still a reluctance on the part of many Russians, particularly those who grew up in the Soviet Union, to answer questions about their private lives, much less about their political views.
More recently, however, as the younger generation has come of age and is not burdened with the fears and mistrust that their parents often have, data have become more available and more reliable. According to this survey:. A similar poll conducted on June 5 among 1, respondents—days before the coronavirus restrictions were eased—indicated that Russians believe that their personal situations have improved.
Sixty-five percent had a positive outlook, but 32 percent said their personal situation was bad. When asked about the overall situation in the country, 56 percent had a negative view, but 38 percent had a positive view.
Other recent polls have looked specifically at living conditions and class structure. Analyst Paul Goble examines one such poll by Rosstat. The state statistical agency reports:. In fact, only These are surprising statistics coming from an official state agency. They remind us that when we talk about life in Russia, we must not just judge the country by conditions in Moscow and St.
Petersburg, but we must take a broader perspective that includes the living conditions of millions of Russians throughout the country. Russia Beyond , which is an arm of the state media company TV-Novosti, recently compared how life has changed for the average Russian during the past 10 years. Among the noticeable changes are that Russians are traveling more and leading a healthier lifestyle. Of note is that the official poverty level Demographic composition and corresponding trends are important tools for measuring the prospects for the development of any society.
For Russia, this is a particularly challenging issue today. Throughout its history, Russia has been a multiethnic state. Even after the Soviet Union broke apart and 15 independent states were formed, the largest of them—Russia—still laid claim to more than nationalities within its borders.
The diversity of its ethnic groups, religions, and languages has enriched the country, but it has also imposed unique challenges on society and the government. The Russian nationality is the largest ethnic group in the country and dominates politics and economic and social structures. There is also a significant Tatar population in Crimea and other parts of Russia. The Crimean Tatars have been a source of political tension for Russia since it seized Crimea from Ukraine in The Kremlin has responded by arresting many of the Crimean Tatar leaders and dissolving the Crimean Tatar Mejlis—the representative body that existed when Crimea was part of Ukraine.
The Tatars share their religious faith with the Muslims of the North Caucasus who inhabit a patchwork of Muslim republics, among which are Chechnya, Ingushetia, and multiethnic Dagestan where more than 30 local languages are spoken.
For centuries, the North Caucasus has been a hotbed of dissent and rebellion. In the s, Russia waged two wars against Chechen rebels who sought to establish their own independent country of Ichkeria. Although the rebellion was suppressed, pockets of resistance remained for years.
There are still rebels representing various Muslim ethnic groups of the North Caucasus engaged in skirmishes with Russian troops in the very mountainous terrain of the region. Russia also continues to launch raids against rebel strongholds and has managed to eliminate most but not all the resistance forces. These guest workers perform much of the menial labor most Russians eschew and provide an important source of revenue to their families in their home countries.
The Kremlin perceives two serious demographic challenges today. The first is the growth of the Muslim population of the country.
The second is the decline of the ethnic Russian population. The birth rate of the Muslim population far outpaces that of the Russians. The ratio of Russians to Muslims is expanded further by an influx of Muslim immigrants and guest workers and an outflow of Russian emigrants to Europe and beyond.
As the Kremlin sees it, the challenge is to maintain Russian dominance in a changing demographic environment. The Muslim Grand Mufti recently predicted that within the next 15 years Muslims would account for 30 percent of the population. It is hard to take this dire prediction seriously. The Kremlin is not going to stand by and watch power shift into the hands of the leaders of the non-Russian republics of the middle Volga region.
Nor are those leaders going to challenge the Kremlin directly. But the leaders of Muslim regions may assert themselves more and use their increasing leverage to attain more rights for their people and to slow down or even try to prevent attempts by the Kremlin to pursue efforts at Russification and homogenization of the country.
The decline in the Russian population has been a serious problem since the collapse of the Soviet Union in Millions of Russians found themselves outside the borders of the Russian Federation as 15 new countries were born. Many returned to Russia, but others stayed in the countries in which they were residing at the time the USSR ceased to exist. For Russia, this has meant the loss of a significant cohort of its compatriots. It also created major problems for the new countries with Russians who were now considered foreigners and many of whom refused to integrate into the societies of their new homelands.
This was a particularly serious problem in Estonia, Latvia, and the Transnistria region of Moldova. Likewise, the large Russian populations in Ukraine and Kazakhstan have caused major political problems, particularly in Ukraine, but potentially in Kazakhstan as well. Within the Russian Federation, the population has been decreasing for several decades as the number of deaths has been exceeding the number of births. It was not until that this trend reversed itself, but this development lasted only four years before it again shifted into negative population growth.
According to Rosstat, in the first 10 months of , deaths outnumbered live births by , Not only is the population declining because of the imbalance in the birth-death ratio, but there is also an outflow of population through emigration and the slow death of rural Russia. Both trends do not bode well for the development of the country and a healthy society. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia became an independent country, travel restrictions and emigration policies were relaxed.
Foreign tourism flourished, and ordinary Russians sought opportunities for education and employment abroad. Children of the rich and mega-rich were among the outflow of Russian citizens seeking a better life for themselves. Their parents purchased plush apartments and villas in Europe and the United States for themselves and their children. Efforts by the Kremlin to get them to return to Russia, to repatriate their wealth, which had been deposited largely in foreign banks and properties, have met with limited success.
Many ordinary Russian citizens who do not have the financial resources or the connections to pursue opportunities abroad wish they could, according to recent surveys.
The independent polling agency Levada Center polled 1, respondents in 50 Russian regions from September 26 to October 4, The poll found that 53 percent of Russian respondents ages 18 to 24 would like to emigrate. Among all respondents surveyed, including all age groups, 21 percent expressed a desire to leave their homeland. The German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, in analyzing this poll and similar surveys, attributes this desire to emigrate to low salaries and the difficulty paying for good, private health care and education.
For centuries, rural Russia has been the heartland of Russian life, the provider of sustenance for the nation, and the root of Russian culture and heritage. Russian writers and revolutionaries alike have idealized rural life and have sought inspiration in it for the future of the country. But the image they portrayed and the ideological expectations they had defied the harsh realities of rural life.
Neither the simplicity and purity of the peasant soul of the novelists nor the revolutionary fervor of some of the revolutionary leaders of the late 19th—early 20th centuries reflected the complexities and cruelties of life beyond the urban centers, the expanding industrial enterprises, and the country estates of the nobility and the gentry.
It would take the Bolsheviks and the upheavals that followed the revolution to transform rural Russia into a tightly controlled agricultural complex of collective and state farms. Millions of peasants lost their lives as the Soviet authorities seized all private property; exiled, imprisoned, and exterminated millions of peasants; and transformed the naive, idyllic image of rural Russian life into a modern version of serfdom. Peasants left the countryside in droves for the cities and were conscripted into serving the burgeoning Soviet industrialization behemoth.
Rural Russia as it had existed for centuries began a slow death. Since the collapse of the Soviet system, many of the collective and state farms have been replaced by private farming. This has transformed the economy of the agricultural sector.
Because farming can no longer rely on large-scale state financing and must succeed based on new economic principles of capitalism and technological modernization, employment in the agricultural sector has changed significantly. Only the most successful farmers can survive. The multitude of agricultural workers who were employed in the often-inefficient Soviet agricultural enterprises has had to abandon their villages as they searched for employment elsewhere.
Unemployment in rural Russia now ranges from 30 to 55 percent. Young people today typically abandon their villages as soon as they can. Consequently, most of the remaining residents are elderly. Russia now reportedly has more than 20, villages that are totally abandoned and another 36, with fewer than 10 residents each. Few of these villages have reliable food supplies or medical care. The remaining residents are living out their final days in villages where they have spent their entire lives.
Once they are gone, these villages will join the ranks of the tens of thousands of ghost towns that were once a vibrant part of rural Russia.
President Putin sees this demographic crisis not just as a threat to the economy and social structure of the country but also to Russia as a distinct civilization, and he is turning to technology to address this problem. It is puzzling why this interview was aired at a time when Russia has been struggling with one of the worst outbreaks of the coronavirus pandemic in the world and its economy has suffered major blows from that and a cataclysmic drop in oil prices.
No new initiatives in the areas of science and technology have been announced, and Putin himself essentially went into isolation during the pandemic, leaving it to governors and other officials to deal with the deadly consequences of the disease. The emotional state of a nation—the overall mood—helps to shed light on the nature of its society and how it might react to major policy decisions or political shifts at the highest levels of authority.
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