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

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.

Uneasy translations: vernacularizing demography for post‐Soviet statecraft

“…Yet the next example of the current moment reversed this relationship and detached the problem of population from the issues of wealth and inequality. When speaking about the present wave of population policies, initiated in 2007, Alexandrov chose the concept of demographic behaviour and social norms to frame the problem of population (Leykin ). To elucidate an argument that demographic behaviour determines population structure, he returned to the visual examples of population pyramids on the blackboard.…”

“…Antonov's views gained further popularity after the state introduced the new demographic policies in 2007. His views are often echoed by politicians from the dominant political parties and resisted by other, more liberally oriented, social scientists (Leykin ; Rivkin‐Fish ). Such normative change, according to Alexandrov and his mentor, has been prompted by a new pronatalist policy – the ‘Maternal Capital’ policy – that offers women a one‐time payment of approximately $13,000 (adjusted for inflation) to encourage them to have a second child.…”

Development of Civics Course for College Students Based on Integrated Transfer Learning Strategy

“…General Secretary Xi Jinping clearly put forward in the National Ideological and Political Work Conference of colleges and universities that ideological and political work is fundamentally the work of people, and we must constantly improve the level of students' thinking, political awareness, moral quality, cultural literacy, so that students can become moral and talented, all-around development of talents [9][10][11]. Colleges and universities, as the main position of talent training, in improving the vocational skills of college students at the same time, should be ideological and political education throughout the whole process of talent training so that college students can grow up healthily under the guidance of correct thinking [12][13]. Especially in the context of the current era of extensive development of curriculum ideology and politics, how to better promote the overall enhancement of ideological and political literacy of college students is a topic worthy of reflection and exploration.…”

“The Fate of the Nation”: Population Politics in a Changing Soviet Union (1964–1991)

“…From Panic to Propaganda -The Soviet Government Response Of the many issues facing the government, demography was initially quite low down the agenda. In the 1960s, demographers wrote at length about emerging problems but struggled to attract ministers' attention (Elizarov 2017;Leykin 2019;Vishnevsky 1996). Gradually, as problems intensified, ministers began to take notice, and, by the late 1970s, the government in Moscow was determined to change differential fertility through policy.…”

“…Toft (2014), for example, has argued for the primacy of the 1979 census in flaring ethnic tensions that are widely acknowledged to have contributed to the dissolution of the USSR. Leykin’s (2019) research shows that in the Brezhnev era the economic determinism of early Soviet demography was replaced by a behavioral approach, in which influencing individual demographic behavior was seen as the key to resolving population issues. This attempt to influence behavior is key to the study presented here and will be examined in more detail throughout.…”