The Human Tide

by Paul Morland

  Yet from a population perspective, things were in good shape, and the legacy of positive demography would see the Communists through many a decade of military and economic struggle. In the late tsarist period, it will be recalled, women had still been having exceptionally large families, averaging around seven children, mortality rates were falling fast with the arrival of rudimentary education and health care, and the population was growing rapidly–much like Britain’s experience nearly a hundred years earlier, although because it was happening later, it was happening faster.

  Russia then experienced a classic case of demographic transition, with falling mortality rates followed by falling fertility and the gradual slowdown in the growth of the population. From the mid 1920s to the mid 1940s fertility halved from six to three children per woman–a drop which had taken Britain twice as long to achieve in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. As women became more urban, better educated and were given opportunities to enter the industrial workforce, so they chose to have fewer children, a pattern which had already been seen in the UK and Germany and which would sweep the wider world. And whatever the other shortcomings of the Lenin and Stalin regime–and they were legion, with their oppression, their terror and their gulags–credit should be given for efforts to emancipate women. Between 1897 and 1939, female literacy rose from one in five to four in five.4 This alone tells us much: literate women simply do not, en masse, carry on having broods of six or seven.

  After the Second World War fertility rates for the USSR as a whole continued to drop, reaching replacement level during the 1970s, after which they continued to fall. Urbanisation and female education can explain much of this, but there are also specifically Soviet aspects to the decline. In contraception, as in many other fields, the Soviet Union did not succeed in providing consumer choice or the quality of consumer goods that were available in the West. Long after the average worker in West Virginia or Westphalia could assume the easy availability of a car or the Pill, Soviet consumers were still relying on broken-down buses and abortions. Family planning was no different in this respect from anything else. Abortions, legalised again in 1955, were for most women the only easily available form of contraception. It is estimated that in the later Soviet period the average Soviet woman was having an average of six or seven abortions in the course of her life,5 and the number of abortions per annum during the 1980s fluctuated around the 7 million mark.6

  Abortion was never an easy choice and was invariably a highly unpleasant experience. Olga from St Petersburg, who had already had seven abortions and expected to have to undergo seven more, reported her experience in the later days of the Soviet Union:

  Then it’s your turn, and you go into a hall splattered with blood where two doctors are aborting seven or eight women at the same time; they’re usually very rough and rude, shouting at you about keeping your legs wide open… if you’re very lucky they give you a little sedative, mostly Valium. Then it’s your turn to stagger out…7

  Meanwhile childbearing was little more attractive, one mother recounting:

  The doctors keep screaming at you ‘Get on with it.’ The treatment is inevitably rough, impersonal; we’re treated as if sex and birth are a big crime. There was so much pain that I had nightmares about it for years afterward–the brutality of our maternity wards are the best contraceptive method we have; very few of us ever want to go through it again.8

  Despite falling fertility rates in the 1950s and 1960s, however, the USSR’s population was still growing fairly rapidly just as Britain’s had done during the Edwardian period thanks to a phenomenon known as ‘demographic momentum’. Births per woman may have been slowing, but thanks to earlier population rises, there were plenty of young women having children while the elderly and therefore those mostly likely to die were a small share of the population. What should have constituted a powerful demographic momentum, however, was blunted by the huge losses Russia incurred as a result of the wars, famines and purges between 1914 and 1945. There is much debate about precisely how many deaths in the Soviet Union were directly due to Stalin and Hitler, whether through famines, the purges, the Einsatzgruppen or deportations of nationalities deemed ‘disloyal’. What is not in question is the sheer scale of the disaster, suffering and loss of life that took place between Tsar Nicholas II taking Russia to war in 1914 and Stalin seeing off the Nazis thirty-one years later. These events all took place against the backdrop of such a strong inbuilt demographic momentum however that, through it all, the population of the Soviet Union kept growing. Despite Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, in the face of two world wars, a civil war, famines and terror, the human tide kept rolling on. The population of what would become the USSR was one hundred and twenty-five million in 1897; by 1970 it had nearly doubled to not much short of a quarter of a billion.9 By the time of its demise, the Soviet Union boasted nearly 287 million people. Robust population growth to 1939 had been hugely set back by the war, but then picked up again after 1945 and continued into the 1960s. However, as it then sank, declining growth was by now built into the population just as it was into the economy. In the face of low fertility, demographic momentum eventually weakens. In the 1970s and 1980s, the average annual growth rate of the Soviet Union was below 1% and falling, and while this was not in itself catastrophic, the ethnic picture which underlay it was worrying for many in the Soviet establishment, as we will soon see.

  Besides the cataclysmic course of history, the other factor which restrained Soviet population growth was the failure of life expectancy to increase significantly even once the wars were over and the terrors diminished. Life expectancy for Russian men was a little over sixty in the late 1950s and by the late 1980s had only increased to just under sixty-four, a rise barely a third of what was achieved across most of the West.10 In fact, disastrously, this was to be a high point of Russian life expectancy and after the fall of the Soviet Union, far from catching up with the levels achieved in the West, it went into reverse and at the start of the twenty-first century was back to its 1950s level. (Since then there has been some improvement, but in 2017 male life expectancy had barely exceeded its late 1980s peak.)

  Unlike Britain or the United States, Russia in the Soviet period was largely a closed system of population, with little immigration and little emigration. The walls of the Soviet Union were high and it was difficult as well as unattractive to get in, and almost impossible to get out. In the 1970s a campaign was launched for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel, but in the whole period up to Gorbachev less than half a million left, which was significant for Israel perhaps but a drop in the ocean for a Soviet Union with a quarter of a billion people.

  The overall numbers, meanwhile, do not tell us what was happening beneath the surface and specifically at the level of individual nationalities. Russia was officially, of course, the Soviet Union, on paper a state with many equal nations, many of which had their own Soviet republics or at least autonomous regions. Russia might have hosted the capital city and its people might have been lauded as the instigators of the first successful socialist revolution, but formally the state had no preference for one national or ethnic group over another. All were supposed to be brothers, united in bonds of fraternal internationalist solidarity.

  The reality was different, and this shows markedly in demographic terms. Russia may have seemed materially ‘backward’ to West Europeans (notwithstanding its unquestionable cultural and scientific achievements), but from the perspective of the outlying regions, Russia’s great cities were metropolises and its people sophisticates. The great industrialised regions, whether the Donbas in eastern Ukraine or the rapidly assembled factories in the Urals, were mostly in regions inhabited by the Slavic core–either Russians, Byelorussians or Ukrainians. These were the first populations to urbanise and become fully literate, and were also, as would be expected, the areas first to experience the demographic transition–with attendant population expansion–while the Caucasus and central Asia were still stuck in the Malthu
sian trap. In addition, there was a degree of pressurised and possibly phoney Russification, such as the recategorisation of between 3 and 4.5 million rural Ukrainians between 1926 and 1959.11

  From the vantage point of the mid twentieth century, it is not surprising that within the Soviet Union it felt as if the future belonged to Russians and their related people. But as the Russian population growth started to slow, so the outlying areas, particularly those in which Muslims predominated, began to undergo their own modernisation. This was no longer just socialism in one country; it was multiple stages of the demographic transition in one country. As ever, infant mortality serves as an excellent indicator of social and economic progress. Fewer than sixty babies per thousand were dying in Russia by the late 1950s–great progress versus earlier periods but still very high–while in Tajikistan the rate was nearly three times as high and other central Asian and Caucasian republics were experiencing similar levels. By the early 1990s infant mortality had fallen across what was by then the former Soviet Union, but whereas by then in Russia an extra thirty-seven babies per thousand were making it to their first birthdays compared to the 1950s, in Tajikistan it was an extra sixty-three.12 Infant mortality was still much higher in central Asia than in Russia–three times higher in Uzbekistan, for example, in the mid 1970s–but the fall in infant mortality had been much greater in the more backward areas, and its sharper fall contributed to their faster population growth.13

  It was not just that more of the children in central Asia and the Caucasus were surviving than in the past; more were being born when compared with Russia. By the early 1990s Tajik women were still on average having more than four children. By then, Russian women were having barely one each.14 The fertility rates of Uzbekistan remained at least two and a half children per woman higher than in Russia throughout this period and at some points was three and a half children higher.15 Uzbekistan was fairly typical of the other republics with predominantly Muslim populations, including what were eventually to become the independent states of Azerbaijan in the Caucasus and Kazakhstan in central Asia. In fact, the data at republic level understates the case at nationality level, since there were non-Russians in Russia increasing Russia’s fertility numbers while there were ethnic Russians in Uzbekistan reducing its fertility. There were Muslim minorities within the Russian Republic (RSFSR) which showed the same characteristics: between 1926 and 1970 the Russian population grew 60% while the number of Tartars more than doubled.16

  With a slowdown in Russian population growth and a rise in the growth among the minorities, the Russian share of the population inevitably started to wane. The shifts were at first fairly modest: between the 1959 census and the 1970 census, the Russian share of the population fell a little over one percentage point and the Turkic and/or Muslim share rose by nearly two percentage points.17 This might appear to be a small shift, but until this point it had been assumed that Russification was an ongoing process, somehow tied to progress and socialism; the 1970 census therefore came as something of a shock to Soviet officials.18

  The trends continued after 1970. The Russian population as a share of the total Soviet population outside the RSFSR (that is, outside the core Russian areas which were to become the Russian Federation) fell from nearly 18% in 1959 to around 14% in 1979.19 It felt as if the great outward movement of Russians, after centuries of aggressive expansion, was reversing itself. In the last thirty years of the Soviet Union the ethnically Muslim population doubled while the Russian population grew by little more than a quarter. The republics of the Soviet Union with Muslim majorities saw their populations rise from just under 13% of the population in 1959 to just under 20% in 1989,20 and it was projected that Russians would be not much more than a third of the total Soviet population by the middle of the twenty-first century.21

  Meanwhile, in addition to their numerical rise there was effective de-Russification taking place among the populations of the central Asian and Caucasian republics. Surveys of the population of the Soviet Union outside the Russian core suggested that fewer and fewer were competent in the Russian language.22 In part this may have reflected the attitudes and aptitudes of indigenous nationalities, but it also reflected the ending of significant migration of Russians to central Asia, and of its partial reversal. This followed Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands policy in which official policy had been to boost agricultural production by settling Soviet citizens (predominantly from the Slavic core) in peripheral areas judged to have agricultural potential. By the early 1960s the policy was clearly failing and the movement of young Russians to the outlying areas was over. The waning Russian presence in the periphery threatened to reduce the unity and coherence of the state and suggested a reversal of what had once seemed an unstoppable trend of Russification, cultural and demographic.

  Like the Anglo-Saxons in America and the English and Afrikaners in South Africa, the Russians were discovering that the advantage to those first out of the Malthusian trap of unconstrained population growth was only temporary; it was only a matter of time before others caught up. The inevitable rise and rise of the Great Russians (i.e. those belonging to the ‘core’ Russian nationality and not related Slavonic ethnicities such as ‘Little Russians’/Byelorussians or Ukrainians) was no more inevitable, it turned out, than the triumph of socialism: Russians were no more destined to fill the earth than the Anglo-Saxons had been; they were not even destined to fill the Soviet Union’s periphery.

  As ever, we have to be a little sceptical of the data and in particular of the classifications which were used. Anthropologists today would blanch at the cut-and-dried approach often taken in the Soviet Union in relation to what constituted a ‘nationality’ and who was to be defined as what. Categories of ethnicity in the Soviet Union were no more ‘perennial’ or ‘natural’ than anywhere else. The distinctions were in some cases arbitrary or at least debatable (e.g. the designation of Jews as a nationality), and in the cases of non-European peoples, often imposed, along with systematised and regularised languages and folklore. To some extent, despite the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, Soviet ethnology was not very different from the European approch taken by powers beyond Europe and was at least in part constructed the better to organise and manage the subject populations.

  Political Responses

  The Soviet Union was not a land in which matters were supposed to take their own course–it was a planned society. For Soviet ideologues, society and the economy were to be run to meet specific goals. With effectively no free market or private property, the state was supposed to provide everything for its citizens from education and a home to a job and a holiday–not to mention a maternity ward and a funeral, the archetypal ‘cradle to grave’. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that demography was not going to be left to chance. But while it turned out that the state could not arbitrarily determine how many children would be born or how many people in any year would die, and therefore it could not entirely control the population’s size and make-up, it could and did react to population trends in the country.

  The pressures on Soviet policy makers were numerous and conflicting, and this perhaps explains the slow and relatively ineffective nature of policy making. First, party doctrine was always pro-natalist. Marx had been explicitly anti-Malthusian, arguing that constraints on population were not ‘natural’ but rather the product of oppressive, exploitative and extractive political and economic systems. Malthus, as far as Marx was concerned, was an apologist of the bourgeoisie for the impoverishment of the peasants and workers, dressing up their poverty as an inevitable consequence of biology and ecology rather than the outcome of an outdated political economy no longer in line with the requirements of the age. For Marx, then, population control was unnecessary; under socialism, there would be plenty for all. From the perspective of doctrine, therefore, the Soviets favoured a large population. Moreover, a large, young, growing population proved the virility of the Soviet model and the life-affirming nature of socialism. Waves of young men–and indeed women�
�had staved off the invading Fascist hordes in 1941. A large and growing population was also required to ensure the workforce continued to expand and make its economic contribution in fulfilment of the plan.

  There were, however, countervailing pressures at work which tended to make Party bosses less keen on large families. These included the need to keep Soviet women in the workforce: while encouraging their childbearing would help meet future requirements for the workplace, it detracted from the more immediate requirements of the day. Childcare facilities could be put in place to encourage childbearing and prolong workforce participation, but there were other demands on resources. Particularly in the early days, the Soviets tended to associate large families with backwardness and the habits of peasants. Educating women, urbanising them and giving them a place in a modern industrial economy was not compatible with their having six or seven children.

  Although the fertility of central Asians and people of the Caucasus contributed to the overall fertility of the country, the reduction in the predominance of Russians in particular and Slavs in general gave rise to concerns which again ran counter to nominally internationalist Marxian orthodoxy. First, there was no doubt a degree of racial prejudice on the part of many in the Party and state establishment, some of whom remained at heart Great Russian patriots if not chauvinists (sometimes disguising or justifying this in Communist terms by reference to the leading role of the Russian people in the revolution). Second, there was concern in some quarters about the loyalty of Muslim and Turkic peoples to the USSR, and a suspicion that their disloyalty might manifest itself in bonds of ethnic and/or religious sentiment, for example, with the Muslims of Afghanistan, many of whom are ethnically close to those of central Asia. Third, from a purely economic perspective, the areas providing population growth were providing people of relatively low educational achievement and low economic productivity: the marginal Russian or Ukrainian would add more to the economy than the marginal Uzbek or Tajik. In short, all Soviet babies were equal but some were more equal than others. A Russian baby was, at least in the eyes of many officials, probably inherently more desirable and certainly more likely to make a loyal and productive citizen than a baby born in Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan.