On May 4, an unidentified activist with a group called the Urals Feminist Initiative was detained in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk while holding a sign reading: “Child-Free Is Not A Crime.” According to OVD-Info, a group that tracks political repression in Russia, the young woman was later released without charges.
Although for many passersby the woman’s sign may have been the first time they saw the strange foreign word “chaildfri,” senior officials in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia have been bandying the term about for years, with many identifying “child-free” as a hostile ideology that poses a threat to the country and its purported “traditional values.”
At a legal forum in St. Petersburg on June 27, Deputy Justice Minister Vsevolod Vukolov announced that the government, working with lawmakers in the Kremlin-controlled parliament, is drafting legislation that would ban the “propaganda” of the “child-free ideology,” particularly among young women. He asserted that this supposed ideology should be characterized as “extremist.”
A top official with the Russian Orthodox Church immediately endorsed the proposal.
“Child-free is an ideology…that claims children are not obligatory in life and, more generally, even fosters hatred toward children,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, the head of the patriarch’s Commission on the Family and the Defense of Motherhood and Childhood. “Such child-hating, people-hating ideologies – particularly child-free – must be banned and equated with extremism since they are destroying our future, our children.”
Critics of the Kremlin see such discussions as the assertion of the needs of the state – facing a demographic decline aggravated by Russia’s war against Ukraine, in which hundreds of thousands of Russians soldiers have been killed or wounded -- over those of individuals and society as a whole.
“What we are seeing is an assault on the rights of women,” said sociologist Igor Eidman.
“What we are seeing is an assault on the rights of women,” said sociologist Igor Eidman. (file photo)
Putin is trying to resolve his demographic problem “through paranoid ideas,” Eidman added. “That is why the Duma will now pass a series of such laws that aren’t aimed at motivating women to have children, but to restrict their right not to have children.”
'An Ultraconservative Program'
Earlier this year, the Rosstat government statistics agency projected a possible worst-case scenario in which the country’s population could fall below 130 million by 2046. The agency’s best-case scenario, in which the population increases by 4.6 million over the same period, projects a birthrate of 1.8 children per woman, which demographer Igor Yefremov noted would be “a post-Soviet high.”
In addition to the casualty toll, Russia’s war against Ukraine has separated hundreds of thousands of young families for extended periods and has prompted hundreds of thousands of people to flee the country.
In response, Putin’s government has unleashed numerous initiatives. The first draft legislation to ban the “child-free ideology” was introduced in the State Duma in September 2022, the same month that Putin ordered military mobilization after Russia failed to achieve a quick victory over Ukraine.
In February, the cabinet mandated “family studies” lessons in the schools. According to a Health Ministry official, the lessons are aimed at “forming a healthy society” through “intolerance of childlessness” and the popularization of large families. Duma members have also raised the idea of imposing a tax on childless families, while officials and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill have called for a crackdown on “inducing” abortions.
In November 2023, Duma Deputy Sultan Khamzayev proposed that the state purchase babies from women who were planning to have abortions and “transfer them to the care of the state.”
Russian children celebrate their enrollment in the Communist Party's Pioneer youth organization by posing on Red Square on May 19.
In May, Deputy Nikolai Burlyayev proposed “chastity lessons” in the schools aimed at “inculcating in girls the understanding that the goal of their lives and God’s calling for women is to be the keeper of the hearth and, to the best of her ability, to be obedient to her husband. And boys must be taught that they are the defenders of the Motherland.”
“Abortion bans, chastity lessons, the repression of LGBT+ people are all connected,” said Yaroslav Sirotkin, an activist with the Kallisto LGBT-rights group and a former schoolteacher who has left Russia. “All of this is part of an ultraconservative program that is being realized in Russia with the participation of the Russian Orthodox Church. The rise in repression is also tied to the war and the Putinist striving toward conservatism.”
Women’s rights activism has been under assault in Russia for years, with male chauvinist vigilantes targeting them with threats and violence.
In a post on Telegram, commentator Aleksandr Nevzorov – who was branded “extremist” along with his wife by a court on July 2 -- called the proposed law against “child-free” families predictable, saying women could face prison for “not fulfilling the plan” to create cannon fodder for the war against Ukraine.
The popular anti-Kremlin X channel Professor Preobrazhensky cautioned those who claim the law will not really lead to the imprisonment of childless women.
“Don’t say, ‘No, that’s absurd. It won’t come to that,’” the channel posted. “It will. It has already come to people being taken to court for poems and plays. It has already come to people being sent to prison for saying, ‘No war.’ It has already come to people being imprisoned for stickers. It will soon come to people getting long prison terms for an unwillingness to actively have children.”
Many critics of the initiative on social media asserted that the closest real examples of “child-free ideology” are religious groups, like the Russian Orthodox Church, that mandate celibacy for some or all of their clergy, as well as for monks and nuns.
“It would be strange for a nun to be agitating for large families,” Yelizaveta Senchukova, a Russian Orthodox nun in the Sakha Republic, also called Yakutia, wrote on Facebook. “I don’t believe that in the Christian paradigm there is any commandment to ensure the genetic diversity of humanity or to improve the demographic situation.”