Abstract
This chapter will explore a number of issues in relation to motherhood and the family in post-Soviet Russia. These include the decline in the birth rate, changes in women’s attitudes towards having children, the emergence of the Childfree movement and, conversely, the emphasis on ‘intensive mothering’ which has emerged in recent years. Since children have traditionally been considered an essential feature of the family, we will also consider whether people’s understanding of the family is undergoing change as more people remain childless. We will argue that although it is easier for women to make choices about having children than it was in the more prescriptive Soviet era, there are still social pressures, old and new, which influence these choices. Our research method is an analysis of discussions between Russian women on the issues outlined above which have taken place on various Russian Internet sites.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The German socialist August Bebel, whose work had great influence on the Russian revolutionaries, argued that the mother ‘renders, at least, the same service to the commonwealth as the man who defends his country’. A. Bebel, Women Under Socialism (New York: New York Labor News Company, 1917), p. 231.
- 2.
Alexandra Kollontai, for example, described motherhood as ‘a duty… a major social obligation’. A. Kollontai, Izbrannye stat’i i rechi, Moscow: Izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury, 1972, p. 156.
- 3.
R. Salecl , Choice, London: Profile Books, 2010, p. 97.
- 4.
In the early years this was not just because of the authorities’ pro-natal position; there simply were no reliable methods. The simplest to produce and use were condoms and diaphragms, but these were not widely available because of a rubber shortage. W. Goldman, ‘Women, Abortion and the State’, 1917–1936’, in B. Evans Clements, B. Alpern Engel and C.D. Worobec (eds) Russia’s Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 247. Following the 1936 ban on abortion , restricted access to reliable contraception was a deliberate policy.
- 5.
‘Materinstvo – eto osobennoe chuvstvo, ono prekrasno!’, Rabotnitsa no 17 1936, p. 5.
- 6.
In the research she carried out on women’s magazines in the early Soviet years , Attwood found one article in Rabotnitsa in 1935, when the ban on abortion was being considered, which noted that ‘the country needs people’ (Mariya Vasil’evna Kimova, ‘Ya protiv aborta’, Rabotnitsa no 17 1935, pp. 12–13). This, however, was the only time she found this mentioned as a reason for the ban. See Lynne Attwood, Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women’s Magazines as Engineers of female Identity (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999).
- 7.
Lebedeva, ‘Syn’, Rabotnitsa no 18, 1938, pp. 16–17.
- 8.
Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly, May 2006, available online: http://archive.kremlin.ru/text/appears/2006/05/105546.shtml, accessed 20 November 2013.
- 9.
Other measures included an increase in childcare benefits, maternity leave payment of no less than 40 per cent of the woman’s previous salary, further financial support until the child reached the age of 18 months, a contribution towards the cost of state-run pre-school childcare and an increase in the value of ‘childbirth certificates’ which helped offset the costs relating to childbirth.
- 10.
The Orthodox Church, which is strongly aligned to Putin, does promote both the prohibition of abortion and limited access to contraception.
- 11.
M. Gessen, ‘Over the Rainbow’, The Guardian Weekend, 16 November 2013, p. 44.
- 12.
Ekaterina Selivirova, ‘Chaildfri: bez paniki. Sotsiologicheskii vzglad. Chastnyi korrespondent’, 21 May 2010, chaskor.ru, accessed 9 December 2016; N.L. Smakotina and S.V. Semko, ‘Protestnye protsessy obshchestva potrebleniya v fokuse sotsiokul’turnogo analiza’, Istin.msu.ru/media/publications/article/873/9df/3138709/2012-No5, accessed 9 December 2016.
- 13.
Mariya Bicharova, Irena Lebedeva, Pavel Karabushchenko (2015), ‘Russian Childfree Community: Reality and Illusions’, in Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences no 214, 2015, pp. 925–932.
- 14.
Sergei Zakharov puts the figure at 12–14 per cent. ‘Rost chisla rozhdenii v Rossii zakonchilsya?’, Demoscope Weekly no. 453–454, 7–20 February 2011, http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2011/0453/demoscope0453.pdf, accessed 19 December 2016. Selivirova puts it at 15 per cent. ‘Chaildfri: bez paniki’.
- 15.
See Moskovskii Demograficheskii Sammit, ‘Sem’ya i budushchee chelovechestva’, 29–30 Iyunya 2011, available online: www.worldcongress.org/Special/MoscowDemographicSummitJune2011EnglishApr.pdf, p. 5, accessed 20 July 2013.
- 16.
Bicharova et al., ‘Russian Childfree Community’.
- 17.
Smakotina and Semko, ‘Protestnye protsessy’, p. 114.
- 18.
Novoselova, ‘Dobrovol’naya bezdetnost’, p. 109.
- 19.
Selivirova, ‘Chaildfri: bez paniki’.
- 20.
Smakotina and Semko, ‘Protestnye protsessy’, p. 114.
- 21.
The term sometimes appears with an exclamation mark, sometimes not. We were unable to determine the origins of its folkloric use. In Internet forums for mothers it was already in use at the start of the 2000s, but this has increased exponentially since around 2010. It can possibly be traced back to the famous science fiction novel Gadkie lebedi (Ugly Swans) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, written in 1967 but not published in the Soviet Union until 1987, in which a husband tells his wife ‘I am a father, but Ty zhe mat’!’—‘YOU are a mother!’ We have found no academic articles on the subject.
- 22.
Maxine David holds that while only 2.1 per cent of the population used the Internet in 2000, this had grown to almost 50 per cent by 2013. Maxine David, ‘@Russia.com: Online and Offline Protest’, Russian Analytical Digest no 134, 30 July 2013, p. 6. http://www.css.ethz.ch/publications/pdfs/RAD-134.pdf, accessed 3 January 2014. A poll conducted by the Levada-Centre in 2013 found that 44 per cent of the Russian population as a whole, and 53 per cent of people living in Moscow, use the Internet every day or almost every day. Levada-Tsentr, http://www.levada.ru/15-07-2013/istochniki-informatsii-moskvichei, accessed 3 January 2014. See also ‘Russia is now an Internet society’, posted by A. Karlin, The Russian Spectrum, http://russianspectrum.com/2013/05/21/russia-an-internet-society, accessed January 2014.
- 23.
The Russian Internet news site, Russian Beyond the Headlines, holds that people in small towns and villages now constitute 40 per cent of the country’s users. Dan Pototsky, ‘40 per cent of Russian Internet users are small-town’, 5 September 2013, http://rbth.co.uk/news/2013/09/05/40_percent_of_Russian_Internet_users_are_small-town_29545.html, accessed 31 Dec 2013.
- 24.
Moscow News holds that 48 per cent of users in Russia are between the ages of 25 and 45, and that Internet use in this age group has almost doubled since 2008.
- 25.
Christine Hine, ‘Internet Research and Unobtrusive Methods’, in University of Surrey Social Research Update, issue 61: Spring 2011, pp. 2–3. http://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/SRU61.pdf, accessed 31 December 2013.
- 26.
A small survey carried out on the forum found that four out of five users were women; most were aged between 20 and 35; four out of five had higher education; 75 per cent had a permanent sexual partner (it was not specified whether any of these were of the same gender); and 50 per cent cohabited with their partner. Ten per cent actually had children, but were now ‘Childfree in their attitudes’. ‘Social portrait of Russian speaking’, http://ru-childfree.livejournal.com/163474.html, accessed 29 March 2006.
- 27.
Robert V. Kozinets, ‘Netnography 2.0’, in Russell W. Belk (ed), Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006), pp. 129–142. This quote – pp. 133–34.
- 28.
Olga Isupova, ‘Support through patient internet-communities: Lived experience of Russian in vitro fertilization patients’ , International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being, vol. 6. no 3, 2011, pp. 1–13.
- 29.
David Jacobson, ‘Doing Research in Cyberspace’, Field Methods, 11,2, November 1999, pp. 127–145 [these quotes from pp. 134 and 135]; http://people.brandeis.edu/~jacobson/Doing_Research_Cyberspace.pdf, accessed 03 January 2014.
- 30.
Kozinets, ‘Netnography 2.0’, p. 135.
- 31.
S. did actually refer to the child as ‘him’, but that is a feature of the Russian language in which nouns are gendered.
- 32.
There were also three recent blogs on the subject of Ty zhe Mat’ written by disaffected young mothers, but we decided not to use them because we would not have been able to disguise the authors’ identities. Opinions expressed in the discussions initiated by the blogs were similar to those in the Woman.ru discussion. An online magazine, Starhit.ru, referred to Ty zhe mat’ in a rather unusual context; it was applauding actresses and other women in the entertainment business who refused to deny their sexuality and continued to flaunt their bodies after giving birth. ‘They raise their children, they are caring mothers, but they are also incredibly beautiful women and they want their fans to know this. … For their boldness and courage they are often attacked by others, whose taunts can be summed up by the phrase ‘Ty zhe mat’!’ See ‘Ty zhe mat’: zvezdy, kotorykh osyzhdayut za seksual’nost’, Starhit.ru 30 October 2016, accessed 26 November 2016.
- 33.
Brian Powell, Counted Out: Same-Sex Relations and Americans’ Definitions of Family (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2010) p. 2.
- 34.
Powell, Counted Out, p. 3.
- 35.
See https://www.hse.ru/data/2016/09/15/1117081329/program-1520820222-evNrunhsRK.pdf for course outline.
- 36.
Alisa Zhabenko, ‘Reproductive Choices of Lesbian-Headed Families in Russia: From the Last-Soviet Period to Contemporary Times’, lambda nordica 2014, pp. 54–84, http://www.academia.edu/12801022/Reproductive_Choices_of_Lesbian-_Headed_Families_in_Russia_From_The_Last-Soviet_Period_to_Contemporary_Times, p. 64, accessed 19 December 2016.
- 37.
Zhabenko, ‘Reproductive Choices of Lesbian-Headed Families’, p. 67.
- 38.
This has followed the introduction in 2013 of Article 6.21, a law banning the propaganda of ‘non-traditional’ sexual relationships to minors.
- 39.
Zhabenko, ‘Reproductive Choices of Lesbian-Headed Families’, p. 74.
- 40.
Salecl , Choice, p. 97.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Attwood, L., Isupova, O. (2018). Choosing Whether to Have Children: A Netnographic Study of Women’s Attitudes Towards Childbirth and the Family in Post-Soviet Russia. In: Attwood, L., Schimpfössl, E., Yusupova, M. (eds) Gender and Choice after Socialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73661-7_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73661-7_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-73660-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-73661-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)