In Russia, size matters when it comes to family.
Just look at the Asachyovs. Vera and her husband Timofey have eight children – from 18-year-old Sofiya to 18-month-old Marusya – and they’ve just been crowned Moscow Family of the Year.
“It’s a great honour and joy,” Vera Asachyova told Sky News when asked how it felt to win.
“It brings pride to our family, not only my husband and I but for the children and their grandmothers and grandfathers.”
And that’s not their only award.
Having had so many children, they’ve also been honoured with the prestigious Order of Parental Glory, which Vera proudly wears pinned to her chest.
The family’s beaming faces are even on billboards around town.
They’re portrayed as the model family doing their patriotic duty.
The Asachyovs have been held up as an example by the state for others to follow
That’s because Russia’s birth rate is at a quarter-of-a-century low and the state wants others to follow the Asachyovs’ lead.
Official data shows 599,600 children were born in Russia in the first half of 2024, which is 16,000 fewer than in the same period in 2023 and the lowest since 1999.
The Kremlin called the figure “catastrophic” and is desperate to boost it.
The latest attempt is a ban on “childfree propaganda”, which was passed unanimously by Russia’s lower house of parliament last month.
It’s supposedly the promotion of life without children, and anyone caught spreading it can now be fined.
But does this propaganda really exist? Even if it does, surely there are more pressing reasons why a woman might not want to have children?
For example the costs involved, or perhaps because their partner is away fighting in Ukraine, or worse, has been killed there.
I put that to Tatiana Butskaya, an MP for Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, who sits on the parliamentary committee for Family Protection.
“This is an ideology against life on earth,” she replied, referring to the so-called propaganda.
“If [our parents] had adhered to this ideology, none of us would be at this press conference today. Perhaps it would’ve been other people here, and maybe even robots.”
Tatiana Butskaya told Sky’s Ivor Bennett families with one child are ‘strange’
Vladimir Putin has previously encouraged women to have at least three children, to secure Russia’s future.
In the same vein, Ms Butskaya went on to criticise families with only one child, calling them “strange”.
“If this family has lived together for a long time, you think, ‘Well, maybe they have illnesses? Maybe something is wrong in the family’. Right?
“They’ve lived together for 30 years and only given birth to only one child. There’s something wrong there.”
According to the authorities, childfree propaganda is everywhere – in films, on the internet and throughout the media. But that’s not how it feels walking around Moscow.
Pretty much everywhere you look there are huge billboards promoting family and motherhood. The message on one reads “we have room to grow” in Russian.
Russia insists women still have the right not to have children, but feminist activists like Zalina Marshenkulova believe that’s no longer true.
Zalina Marshenkulova called the ban ‘reproductive violence’
The prominent blogger left Russia soon after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and was charged in absentia with “justifying terrorism” by a Russian court earlier this year.
“It’s reproductive violence,” she told Sky News, referring to the ban on childfree propaganda. “It’s another repressive law they needed to turn all women into mechanisms for reproducing slaves.
“If you’re smart, if you love freedom, if you respect yourself, you can’t live in Russia. That’s what they try to say to us by this stupid law.”
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A low birth rate isn’t Russia’s only demographic problem, of course. It also has a rising mortality rate, made worse by the war in Ukraine.
Stopping the war would help boost the population. But that’s not discussed.
Apparently, childfree propaganda is the bigger issue.
