Russia, the sick man of Europe

Public Interest, Wntr, 2005 by Nicholas Eberstadt

And the problem of involuntary infertility in Russia today is further exacerbated by the current explosive spread of potentially curable sexually transmitted infections (STIs). According to official figures, for example, the incidence of syphilis in 2001 was one hundred times higher in Russia than in Germany, and several hundred times higher for Russia than a number of other European countries. One recent survey in St. Petersburg calculated that 15 percent of the college students questioned had at least one sexually transmitted disease. Since untreated or inadequately treated STIs can result in sterility the potential for inadvertent impediments to childbearing for Russia's young men and women due to such infections could be appreciable.

A second obstacle to an increase in the Russian birth-rate is the Russian family itself. Russian patterns of family formation have been evolving markedly over the past generation--and not in a direction conducive to larger families. Simply put, young Russians are now much less likely to marry--and ever more likely to divorce if they do.

Between 1981 and 2001, marriage rates fell by over one third, while divorce rates rose by one third. In 2001, Russia recorded three divorces for every four new marriages--a breakup ratio even higher than Scandinavia's. The human import of these trends can perhaps be better understood by thinking in terms of a woman's odds of getting married or divorced. In 1990, under Russia's then-prevailing nuptiality patterns, marriage was almost universal--and the odds of eventually divorcing were about 40 percent. By 1995, the odds of getting married were down to 75 percent--while the odds of eventual divorce had risen to 50 percent. In just five years a Russian woman's odds of forming a lasting marriage dropped from about three in five to three in eight. Since then, the odds of having a lasting marriage in Russia seem to have declined still further.

At the same time that Russian marriages were becoming less common--and more fragile--the disposition to childbearing outside of marriage was increasing. In 1987--the recent high-water mark for Russian fertility--about 13 percent of the country's newborns were out of wedlock. By 2001, the proportion had more than doubled, to nearly 29 percent. The overwhelming majority of Russia's newly emerging cohort of illegitimate children, it seems, were being raised by single mothers. Consensual unions and cohabitation still account for the living arrangements of only a tiny fraction of Russia's young adults.

The rapid decline of the two-parent family in contemporary Russia undercuts prospects for substantial increases in national fertility levels. Relative to available household resources, all other things being equal, raising children in a mother-only family is a much more expensive and difficult proposition than in an intact family. It is true that fertility rates in Russia are currently 20 to 30 percent below those of the Scandinavian countries, even though the level of marital commitment in the Nordic countries is low, and the level of illegitimacy is high. But unlike the Scandinavian welfare states, Russia does not provide generous public benefits to help mothers raise their young children--nor could the Russian state afford to do so even if it were so inclined.