Editor’s Introduction

How optimistic are people about bringing children into the world? How have families been changing? In this time of interconnected uncertainty in the Americas, Europe, and Eurasia, highlighted by difficulties of discerning accurate public opinion, it is sometimes appropriate to turn to basic sociological clues. People tend to “vote with their feet” (and other body parts) when it comes to having children. Historically, poor people in preindustrial societies and in rural areas had large families because children were insurance policies for kin-group survival. In contrast, urban and elite families historically and in recent times in Europe, the United States, and Russia were optimistic enough that their children would survive that they did not need to have many children. With urbanization and industrialization, birth rates and associated indicators of “natality began inexorable declines, in many places to below replacement level. What has been considered “progress” by some, including feminists, became alarming according to nationalistic leaders, often men, advocating “family values” and worried about population fertility.¹

In Russia, the calculus behind some attitudes toward having children began to shift in the 1960s and especially after the Soviet Union’s collapse. In the 1990s, a general decline in birth rates and a horrific mass contemplation of economic strife, marked by downward mobility trends and a zigzagging middle class, meant that families on average in Russia had far fewer children. This was particularly true of Russian families, but also some non-Russians. Caution about having children was only partially offset by increased conservative religiosity, whether a given family was Muslim or Russian Orthodox. Demographic decline was also partially due to generational “age structure” trends that began during the economic and morale stagnation of the late Soviet period. It was enhanced and complicated by social disruptions that the collapse of the Soviet Union created. Under the surface of rhetorical optimism about newly forming national states and identities were families (whether broken or whole) fearful about their futures.²

The first two articles in this issue examine recent demographic trends in two crucial bellwether republics within the Russian Federation: Sakha (Yakutia) and Komi. Their surveys touch on issues of social uncertainty, as well as on a short-term demographic reprieve that some specialists see as resulting from greater nativist, nationalist optimism in Russia under President Putin. One key to this has been the rise of “family values” propaganda supported by the Russian Orthodox Church, resonating with a broad swath of Russia’s citizens. However, a possibly stronger and more pragmatic reason has been the “stimulus package” of fertility measures, also known as “maternity capital,” supported by the presidential (federal) administration and many regional governments. Since 2007, under several programs, various levels of government have basically bribed women to have children, especially second and third children. In some ways, these child-friendly policies were a somewhat diluted revival of the gung-ho spirit that valorized “Mother Heroines” who had over 10 children in the Soviet period. Another factor may have been President Putin and his advisors’ recognition that they did not want ethnic balances among Russia’s multinational population to shift too dramatically away from favoring Russians.

In the Sakha Republic, sociologists Svetlana A. Suknëva and Anastasiia S. Barashkova argue that northerners within the multiethnic republic maintained larger families and kept traditions that privileged marriage better than in urban and relatively more southern areas of the republic. The authors openly fear the erosion of two-parent families, and the decline of “child-centric” households, in favor of selfish “individualism” that results in negative demographic trends. Ethnic demographic proportions are particularly significant in a republic where the dominant “titular” nationality, Sakha (Yakut) had an over-80 percent majority in the 1926 census. But it was radically reduced to a one-third plurality by the end of the Soviet period. In Russia’s most recent census of 2010, Sakha were designated as having a suspicious 49.9 percent, compared to Russians, Ukrainians, and other indigenous groups, such as the Even, Evenk, and Yukaghir.³

Describing the Komi Republic, sociologist Larisa A. Popova takes an advocacy tone as she praises every level and type of “maternity capital” policy for stimulating Komi and Russian families alike. She explains that the republic, mostly following Russia-wide patterns, has nonetheless performed better in some fertility, family-oriented trends. She attributes this especially to rural conservative Komi families, and to those who put off child-bearing in the 1990s. Popova notes the significance of improved maternal health care for raising natality indicators, but she also warns that positive trends easily deteriorate when policies of general health subsidies and “maternity capital” evaporate.⁴

The final two articles take us out of Russia, into Kazakhstan. They introduce important additional dimensions to any discussion of demography, family, and ethnicity interrelationships. The historical demography that Aigul B. Taskuzhina et al. depict may seem too remote in time and too focused on the front lines of Russian tsarist colonialism to have major resonance in today’s social politics. But the authors frame their discussion by saying that in order to understand the “polyethnic” mosaic of today’s citizen-based Kazakhstani identity, one must know how and why a considerable variety of ethnic groups, especially Russian and Ukrainian Cossacks, came to settle in northern Kazakhstan. For example, Russian empire “state peasants” could upgrade their status by moving to borderlands and becoming part of Cossack contingents. This Slavic-dominated military legacy was in part mitigated by an important aspect of the notorious Cossacks: they were themselves ethnically varied, incorporating Bashkirs, Kalmyks, Tatars, captured Poles and Swedes, and many others. Due to major “migration streams,” as well as to incursions of the Mongol Dzhungars, ancestors of today’s Kalmyks, Kazakhs in turn (and some neighboring Kirghiz and Uzbeks) often were pushed aside, mixing among themselves and eventually settling farther south of shifting Russian border areas. Today, while living in cities filled with skyscrapers, fountains and universities, some Kazakhs have memories of hierarchical nomadic kin-groups, ancestral tribes ranked as “Junior, Middle and Senior” zhuz.⁵

In addition to the fascinating polyethnic legacy of today’s Kazakhstan, a further ramification, relevant to the authors’ historical outline, concerns the momentous and expensive 1997 decision to move the capital of Kazakhstan from Alma-Alty in the Kazakh-dominated south to a small town called Akmola, in the more Slavic and ethnically variegated north. The decision was reputedly made by President Nazarbayev (or validated on his birthday), in order to consolidate the security of the newly independent state of Kazakhstan in its Soviet-era borders. Northern Kazakhstan was perceived to be demographically vulnerable, especially given bombastic rhetoric from Russian nationalists in Russia. By 1998, the old name Akmola (meaning white cemetery and sometimes glossed as sacred land) was changed to Astana (capital city). Astana has become a burgeoning futuristic city, and, as planned, has attracted many Kazakh elite to the north.

In the finale article, we turn from sociology and political demography to charming, well-illustrated ethnography. Authors Bakyt S. Abzhet and Zhuldyz A. Zhumashova (or Baqıt Abjet and Juldız Jumaşova in Kazakh spellings) remind us that childbirth customs help reveal the meaning behind what enables demographic trends in the first place. The significance of childbirth for many peoples is marked by poignant rituals that often outlast many other kinship-based solidarity rites. For some Kazakhs, the conservatism of family values is depicted and epitomized in the ways pre-Islamic traditions concerning childbirth have lasted into the present, in some cases reinforced by living respect for epic narratives and shamanic practices. While formally Islamic, concepts behind a newborn’s forty-day strengthening rites within the nurturing warmth of a mother’s kin group reveal traditions older than Islam. Such beliefs include Zoroastrian ideas concerning protector puppies, the perceived fragility of babies’ bones and souls—and the importance of maternal support groups among Kazakh nomads. Also crucial today as well as in the past are effective rituals to rejuvenate a mother’s vigor after childbirth. Further, a child is not considered fully alive and relatively safe from harm until after forty days. Ritual celebrations of joy, marked with feasts called toy after a newborn has lived for a year, mark the beauty and wonder of bringing children into a world of community-based Kazakh values.⁶

In sum, a range of approaches to issues surrounding changing Eurasian demographics are represented here: sociological, political, medical, historical and ethnographic. Data come from Russia and Kazakhstan, and the authors are themselves of varied backgrounds. What they all have in common is a desire to see the peoples and populations of their countries flourish without fear that bringing up children in an uncertain world could be foolhardy.

Notes

1. A particularly striking example was the reputed statement of General Anatoly Kvashnin that “Our women have betrayed us comrades.” He was worried about declining birth rates influencing the ability of the Russian military to recruit healthy, draft-age men in sufficient numbers to further Russia’s domestic and foreign goals.

2. For more on demographic, class and health indicators for Russia, see the work of Murray Feshbach, Judyth Twigg, Nicholas Eberstadt, and Harley Balzer. See also Ekaterina A. Kvasha, for example her “Mortality of Children Under One Year in Russia: What Has Changed after the New Definition of Live Birth and Still Birth,” Demographic Review, 2014, no. 5, pp. 69–84 [original: Demograficheskoe obozrenie, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 38–56 (in Russian)]. Significantly, she explains (p. 69) that while Russia converted to World Health Organization definitions in 2012, they have a long way to go to reach European child health standards: “The infant mortality rate achieved in Russia by 2011 (7.4 per 1,000 live births) is over three times higher than in countries with its lowest levels (in 2011, 2.3 percent in Norway and 2.4 percent in Finland and Estonia) and also much higher than in most of Europe, including Eastern Europe.”

3. In 2012, I was told privately by Moscow sociologists and officials in the census bureau that the 2010 census was partially distorted, including ethnic proportions in Sakha Republic. For perspective, see theme issues of this journal: “Demography and the Politics of Identity in the Russian Federation,” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, 1995, vol. 34, no. 1; “Framing the Census in Russia (Rossiia)” Parts 1 and 2 Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, 2005, vol. 44, no. 1, 2; “Family Values: From Engagement and Polygamy to Divorce,” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, 2000, vol. 38, no. 4. See also “The Family in Russia,” Russian Education and Society, 2011, vol. 53, no. 3.

4. For perspective on the Komi, see the work of Evgenii Tsypanov, and Joachim Otto Habeck, What It Means to Be a Herdsman: The Practice and Image of Reindeer Husbandry among the Komi of Northern Russia (Munich: Halle Studies in Anthropology of Eurasia, distributed by Rutgers Transaction Publishers, 2005). See also “Ceremonial Life: Komi Past and Present,” Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, 2012, vol. 51, no. 2.

5. The shifting territories of these are discussed in the article featured here. See the work of Barbara Martin on the multiethnic Cossacks, and Martha Olcott on the shaping of Kazakhstani identity. See also Alfred J. Rieber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (New York–Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Daniel Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies, 1997).

6. For glorious glimpses of living Kazakh traditions, see the docu-drama, shot in Mongolia, The Eagle Huntress, 2016, directed by Otto Bell.