Judith Record McKinney. Feminist Economics. Volume 10, Issue 2, 2004.
Introduction
After more than a decade of attempted transition, it is clear that the Russian “revolution” of 1991, like that of 1917, has failed to deliver quickly on its promise to bring about dramatic improvement in the lives of ordinary Russians. Rather than bringing prosperity and empowerment, this attempt to make fundamental changes in the economic, political, and social system of the country has imposed enormous hardship on much of the population, especially on women and their children, and most particularly on women raising their children alone.
Because centrally planned socialist systems are designed to socialize the costs and benefits of many activities, including childrearing, one might expect them to be particularly supportive of lone mothers. It would therefore make sense that the transition to a market economy in Russia would have hurt lone mothers and their children more than other groups. Many of the difficulties lone mothers in Russia face today are not new at all, however. The Soviet system clearly failed to solve the “woman question” and the legacy from that period—particularly the structure of the existing stock of both physical and human capital and the appalling state of the environment—continues to impose costs on Russian women. What has made life harder for lone mothers in the post-Soviet period, beyond the sharp drop in GDP and the state’s difficulty collecting taxes, is not retreat from the commitment to women as mothers but retreat from the commitment to women as workers.
The demographic situation in post-Soviet Russia, characterized by low birth rates, high mortality rates, and negative population growth, is widely viewed as a crisis and has sparked considerable discussion about how best to encourage Russian women to bear more children. While a striking variety of solutions to the demographic problems has been proposed, most rest on the assumption that the government still has an important role to play. Indeed, the basic assumptions of both the Russian legislature and the general population about the role of the government in ensuring the welfare of the population have changed little from the Soviet period (Linda Cook). At the same time, concerns about unemployment, social ills, and excessive government spending have created a political environment in which there is much less support than in the past for the idea that the government should make it easy for women to work outside the home.
Socialism: Theory vs. Soviet Practice
As Wendy Goldman argues in her book Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917 - 1936, Bolshevik theorists “believed that capitalism had created a new contradiction, felt most painfully by women, between the demands of work and the needs of family” (1993: 2). With industrialization, mass production in factories substantially replaced household production by women. At the same time, women were forced to enter the paid labor force, since their husbands did not receive a wage high enough to support their families. Since women still had full responsibility for the household and children, they bore a heavy double burden that made it impossible for them to play a role in public life equal to that of men as well as to take adequate care of their children.
The Bolsheviks believed that socialism would resolve this dilemma and ease women’s burden by creating arrangements for the public provisioning of the population. Eventually, the family—like the state—would wither away, but until that time children would be reared by some combination of the state and the parents. According to Goldman, the policy implications of this were clear: “If the state was serious about women’s liberation, it had to implement policies to abolish wage differentiation, to raise wages, to establish broad social services, and to socialize household labor” (1993: 48).
While the liberation of women was never in fact a central concern to Soviet leaders, ensuring a supply of workers and soldiers large enough to “build socialism in one country” and protect it from the hostile capitalist world clearly was. The catastrophic demographic consequences of World War I, the Civil War, World War II, and the brutal Stalinist campaigns of forced collectivization of agriculture and the Great Terror made this need all the more urgent. Because young adult males were most likely to have been killed during both the wars and the Stalinist excesses, the state had a strong interest in making it possible for women to be simultaneously engaged in both productive and reproductive labor, whether or not they were married.
The Soviet centrally planned socialist system should have been able to devote substantially more resources to the creation of human capital via investment in childcare, healthcare, and education. Because the system was designed to socialize both costs and benefits, it should also have been able to structure wages, prices, and social benefits to spread the burden of raising children more broadly.
The actual record of the Soviet state in resolving the tension between women as workers and women as mothers was mixed. While it achieved extremely high rates of labor force participation by women, including those with young children, it failed to prevent birth and fertility rates from falling, just as it failed to reduce women’s double burden significantly. Soviet investment policy focused on other goals, and the promise offered by a progressive family policy was undercut by inadequate funding.
Soviet mothers were hurt both by the high level of forced saving, which resulted in scant provision of household appliances and other goods and services designed to make it easier to maintain a household, and by the choices leaders made in allocating the resulting investment funds. Most investment resources were directed toward creation of physical capital, especially in heavy industry. Investment in light industry, housing, and services was extremely low. Investment in human capital was spotty. It was much better in education than in healthcare, and most impressive in the early years, when the new leaders felt compelled to turn a predominantly rural and largely illiterate population into a modern industrial labor force.
The Soviets did devote significant investment resources to childcare, where the link with women’s participation in the industrial labor force was inescapable. The first big investment in childcare facilities came with the huge labor requirements of the First Five-Year Plan: the number of nurseries for infants was over 5 million in 1932, twenty times greater than in 1928, while the number of pre-school facilities, which was only 2,155 in 1927, had reached 25,700 in 1934 - 35 (Gail Lapidus: 130; Goldman: 313 - 34). Investment in childcare facilities continued throughout the Soviet period, with another major campaign taking place under Brezhnev. In 1990, 66.4 percent of all children of pre-school age attended such facilities, a slight decrease from 68.3 percent in 1985 (Gosudarstvennyi komitet rossiskoi federatsii po statistike 1992: 231).
Brezhnev’s government also directed resources to the development of after-school care and summer camps for older children. In 1970, about 10 percent of Soviet children aged 5 to 14 received after-school care; ten years later, more than twice as many children were in after-school care even though the total number in this age group had fallen by about 15 percent. About 18 percent of children aged 5 to 14 attended summer camp in 1970 and almost 29 percent did in 1980 before attendance fell slightly to 27 percent in 1990 (Gosudarstvennyi komitet SSSR po statistike: 74, 219; Judith Harwin: 39).
If Soviet investment in childcare facilities was exceptionally high by international standards, investment in housing was extremely low. This sector was almost completely neglected until after Stalin’s death, and despite the greater attention it received under subsequent leaders, especially Khrushchev, at the end of 1986 there was a total of only about 4 billion square meters of useful living space for a population of just under 280 million (Gosudarstvennyi komitet SSSR po statistike: 373, 517). This lack of housing space created significant stress in the lives of urban families, who often lived either in communal apartments, with shared bath and kitchen, or in crowded worker dormitories.
There was also little investment in light industry. Although far greater attention was paid to private consumption under Khrushchev and Brezhnev than under Stalin, both the stock of household appliances and their quality remained low, and consumer services were still woefully inadequate in the mid-1980s. While the provision of childcare services sharply reduced the amount of time women spent caring for their children, there was no corresponding effort by the state to reduce the time it took to maintain a household. Women’s burden was further increased by the paucity of retail establishments and by Soviet distribution policy, which kept prices of necessities—in particular, housing, basic foodstuffs, and children’s clothing—artificially low and relied on mechanisms other than prices to allocate many goods and services.
Time-budget studies carried out in the 1960s in the Soviet Union found that while men and women spent roughly the same number of hours a week working and meeting physiological needs (slightly less in both cases for women), women spent over twice as much time as men performing housework (Lapidus: 270 - 1). In a survey conducted in March of 1980, Soviet women who worked for state enterprises (that is, all employed women except those on collective farms) were found, on average, to spend over six hours a week on acquiring goods and services, and 29.5 hours a week on housework (Tsentral’noe statisticheskoe upravlenie SSSR: 89).
Soviet investment and distribution policy thus imposed heavy costs on all Soviet mothers, and did relatively little to address the particular challenges facing lone mothers. While the provision of childcare facilities might be expected to have made the greatest difference to lone mothers, who could not rely on the income of a spouse, Soviet wages were kept so low that even married mothers felt a financial compulsion to work outside the home and therefore relied heavily on these facilities. While the decision to keep the prices of necessities low might be expected to have provided greatest help to low-income families—a category to which most families headed by lone mothers belonged—allocation on the basis of “first-come, first-served” required the expenditure of significant amounts of time, which for lone mothers may have been even more scarce than money. Although this might also be expected to mean that the lack of labor-saving household appliances placed a heavier burden on lone mothers, time-budget studies indicate that the reverse was true. In a study published in 1965, G. S. Petrosian found that the number of hours of housework performed by a working mother with one child dropped by between three and eight hours a week in the absence of a husband (Lapidus: 272 - 3).
The very low levels of investment in housing had the effect of changing the configurations of lone motherhood. It essentially created lone mothers out of young married women forced to live with their children in female dormitories while their husbands lived in male dormitories, but also meant that not all women raising their children without partners were truly lone mothers. In some cases, lone mothers were likely to be living with other adults. If never married, a lone mother would almost certainly have continued to live at home (unless she was one of the large numbers of young girls who moved away from their home towns to a larger city, in which case she almost certainly lived in a dormitory with other workers); if divorced, she might very well continue to live with the father of her children for lack of alternative housing. While the latter situation was clearly undesirable, an unmarried mother living with her mother or grandmother might in fact be better off in many ways (though not financially) than her married counterpart, since the older woman would have been more likely to provide assistance with childcare and housework than the average Soviet father. (Of course, for a married woman there were two possible babushki to turn to.)
If Soviet investment policy generally neglected the needs of mothers, family policy was designed with these needs clearly in mind. While the specific provisions changed over the decades in response to changes in the availability of resources, in the strength of the perceived need for female participation in the labor force, in the degree of concern over declining birth rates, and in attitudes about the role of the family in creating—and redressing—social problems, the underlying perception of children as public goods remained constant. Soviet family codes were generally remarkably progressive in their treatment of marriage, divorce, and out-of-wedlock births relative to those in other countries (Goldman: 57). Insofar as policy explicitly distinguished between lone mothers and those with husbands, it generally attempted to provide additional support for the former.
In the early years of Bolshevik rule, ideology supported the use of large public institutions for rearing children. These were to be part of a broader drive to socialize household responsibilities through the development of public dining facilities, public laundries, and the like, thereby freeing women from dependence on men and enabling them to raise children outside of marriage. Bolshevik practice, however, fell far short of ideology, as the drains of the Civil War and reconstruction made it impossible to provide adequately even for those millions of children left without families as a result of the wars and famine.
The New Economic Policy of the 1920s, which temporarily allowed private enterprise and the operation of market forces in parts of the economy, may have been successful in boosting agricultural and industrial output back to pre-war levels, but it took a tremendous toll on Soviet women. Fired from their jobs to make room for returning soldiers, abandoned by husbands quick to take advantage of the so-called “post-card divorce,” and faced with the challenge of providing both financial and physical care for their children, many women were forced to turn to prostitution (Goldman: 101 - 43).
By the mid-1930s, Stalin made virtue of necessity and asserted that the family was indeed the best setting for raising children. Divorce became both more difficult and more expensive, while the penalties for failure to pay alimony increased (Goldman: 331). Despite the renewed official commitment to traditional families, however, the Soviet state continued to play a far more active role in providing for its children than was the norm in capitalist countries. Monthly allowances for large families—those with at least eight children—were introduced in 1936; in 1944, with the population losses of World War II a serious concern and with urbanization reducing average family size, families with as few as four children became eligible for these allowances (Mary Buckley: 133 - 4; Goldman: 331 - 2; Harwin: 19 - 20).
The Family Code of 1944 is strikingly pro-natalist. In general, neither marital status nor income level played a role in determining state benefits (or taxes). All that mattered was the number of children and whether any of them were born after 1944 (David Ransel: 77). Single and married women were treated identically, receiving a one-time grant upon the birth of a third child and a monthly subsidy for subsequent children until they turned 5. Anyone, married or not, with two or fewer children was subject to a special tax (Buckley: 133 - 4; Harwin: 19 - 20, 24).
Other features of the 1944 law were shaped by concern over the dearth of young males, and were designed to make life easier both for lone mothers and for the men who fathered their children. Children born to unmarried women no longer had any claims on their fathers and could not even have the father’s name appear on their birth certificates, presumably freeing men to sire more children than they could personally afford to support. Instead, the state was to provide the necessary financial support for children up to the age of 12. Should the mothers choose, the state would also rear the children in institutions, either temporarily or permanently (Harwin: 19 - 20).
By the late 1960s, Soviet leaders faced many of the problems of both the 1940s (low birth rates) and the 1920s (family instability, unsupervised children, and other social ills). Their response to the first was to continue trying to reduce the private costs of raising children through both increased maternity leave and increased investment in childcare facilities (Harwin: 38 - 40). They did not, however, increase the size of monthly allowances.
In 1980, lone mothers still received only 5 rubles per month for one child, 7.5 rubles a month for two, and 10 rubles a month for three, exactly the same amounts they were entitled to in the late 1940s and only a fraction of the official monthly poverty line of 66.6 rubles per capita (Mervyn Matthews: 23, 122). Although family allowances were not increased, there was an attempt to target families with especially low per capita income by introducing small monthly allowances for every child under the age of 8 in such families (Lapidus: 305; Harwin: 40).
To address family instability, unsupervised children, and the like, the leaders tried to increase parents’ sense of personal responsibility. In 1968, for the first time since 1944, women could file paternity suits (John Dunstan: 134). Although the state apparently wanted fathers to assume greater financial responsibility mothers received the bulk of attention by Soviet analysts, who attributed social problems primarily to women’s failure to perform adequately as mothers. The only significant assistance mothers received, however, was the longer maternity leave, both paid and unpaid, mentioned above. The state continued to pay far more to care for children outside the home (in childcare facilities, day schools, boarding schools, and orphanages) than it paid to women directly in the form of child-related allowances (payments to pregnant women, to children up until their first birthday, to lone mothers and mothers of large families, and to children in poor families). In 1983, the former figure was 17.6 billion rubles, the latter only 4.4 (Tsentral’noe statisticheskoe upravlenie SSSR 1985: 84 - 5).
Popular attitudes toward lone mothers varied over time more than state policy did, but like policy they tended to reflect economic and demographic circumstances. It was in the immediate aftermath of World War II that lone mothers were portrayed most positively. Not only women who had actually lost their husbands during the war but also those who had lost potential husbands were viewed with great sympathy. David Ransel, in his study of three generations of rural women in Russia, quotes a woman who married in the late 1930s:
Yes, there were many widows here who had children… . Some of the women gave birth without fathers. Well, these were decent women and they did this consciously. They didn’t want to have to go through life alone, and that meant they had to have a child, or even two, or even three without fathers… . And [these] mothers are respected. No one here treated them with contempt, we didn’t shun them or reproach them. After all, what was one to do? (Ransel: 115)
A slightly less generous view is expressed in comments recorded by two British marriage counselors visiting the Soviet Union in the 1960s. The first is unattributed; the second is by a lawyer.
In the years just after the war … [the mother alone] was considered to be a very important person. She was rendering a great service to the state, by helping to make up for our terrible war losses. She was such a privileged person that you didn’t dare utter a word of criticism of her. (David Mace and Vera Mace: 253)
I can remember these “mothers alone” coming into my office to demand their legal rights. Some of them behaved as if they were the privileged class in our society. (Mace and Mace: 253)
The relatively sympathetic view seems to have eroded with time, as conditions changed. By the 1960s, never-married mothers began to be condemned in print for irresponsibility. Women of childbearing age were no longer in cohorts whose sex ratio was skewed by the terror and the wars, and abortion was again legal, so there were no longer extenuating circumstances for the birth of a child outside of marriage (Dunstan: 134). By the late 1980s, in the first flurry of free-wheeling discussion sparked by Gorbachev’s introduction of glasnost’, a Soviet version of the “welfare queen” started to appear in the press (Elizabeth Waters: 128 - 30). Women, especially unmarried women, were condemned for having children in order to receive state benefits and for taking advantage of the law which allowed mothers to leave their children in state care for an indefinite period. Within a few years, however, the attitude had softened, as the economic difficulties faced by these women became more obvious (Waters: 131 - 2).
Changes in conditions and attitudes were accompanied by changes in behavior. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, roughly one-third of all births were outside of marriage, but in 1970 this proportion had fallen to 10.6 percent. The proportion then climbed again, reaching 12.0 percent in 1985 and 14.6 percent in 1990 (Sergei Zakharov: 50).
Reform and Transition
Gorbachev’s attempts to revitalize Soviet socialism had a number of consequences for state policy toward families. At the same time that glasnost’ led to much more public discussion of a wide range of social ills, increased attention to economic efficiency threatened to create significant unemployment. In the eyes of Gorbachev and other leaders at the time, these two problems could be solved simultaneously by encouraging women to return to their role as wives and mothers. Since Soviet women had never actually abandoned these roles, the real idea was that they could now shed the additional role of employee. In addition to refraining from taking jobs from the men who were believed to need them more, women would be in a position to address any number of social ills by staying home and tending to the needs of both their children (thus preventing them from becoming drug abusers, prostitutes, or juvenile delinquents) and their husbands (thus preventing them from becoming alcoholics or emasculated drones). Not only would Soviet men then find it easier to meet the demands of the reformed system, but Soviet children would receive the maternal nurturing and supervision necessary to help them mature into responsible citizens and workers (the latter presumably now only in the case of sons). The belief that having women stay home would reduce social ills was not new; but the expectation that it could be done without sacrificing current production was. There also seemed to be little recognition during these discussions that the return to their “purely womanly mission” would be possible for the sizeable (and increasing) number of lone mothers only with a substantial increase in government assistance.
As it became obvious that Gorbachev’s reforms would lead to considerable redistribution of economic well-being, there was more and more discussion about the need to buffer the population from the costs of these reforms. Since a key element of the reforms was the deliberate privatization of a larger share of costs and benefits, not all groups could be protected. There was, however, widespread agreement among government officials that “families with children” should not be harmed. At the same time, officials agreed that family assistance policies needed to be overhauled. In a roundtable discussion of the family published in the journal Nedelya in 1987, for example, M. Kravchenko, Vice Chair of the USSR State Committee on Labor and Social Questions, noted that the 6 billion rubles paid out annually in family assistance were paid in the form of benefits that had been “established in different years and for the solution of different problems. Some of them no longer play the role they were intended to play” (Nedelya: 17 - 18). Gorbachev struck a similar note in his speech to the Congress of People’s Deputies in May of 1989 when he called for an “audit” of all social benefits and privileges (Mikhail Gorbachev: 1 - 3).
The difficulty lay in establishing appropriate criteria, but for the most part in this period the government simply increased benefits in recognition of increasing need. In late summer of 1990 the newspaper Izvestiia reported that the Council of Ministers had “adopted a resolution on additional measures to provide social safeguards for families with children in connection with the changeover to a regulated market economy” (Izvestiia: 1). The monthly allowance for lone mothers was increased from a fixed rate of 20 rubles to an amount equal to half the minimum wage (that is, to half of 70 rubles) (Izvestiia: 1; Government of the Russian Federation: 41). With this change in the method of calculation, moreover, the frequent upward revisions in the minimum wage, which took place starting in 1991, automatically led to increases in the monthly allowance as well.
There was some attempt to distinguish between those who genuinely needed this assistance and those who did not. For example, the resolution “On Urgent Measures for Improving the Position of Women, Safeguarding Mother and Child and Strengthening the Family,” adopted by the Supreme Soviet in the spring of 1990, called for monthly allowances for children living in families with a per capita income of no more than twice the minimum wage. On the other hand, that same resolution also called for a one-time payment on the birth of every child, without regard to family income (William Moskoff: 105). Thus, Gorbachev-era policy, like that of the earlier Soviet period, combined targeted assistance to the most needy with a basic commitment by the state to recognize that society as a whole should bear some of the costs of raising children.
Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yeltsin’s embrace of market capitalism, policy-makers continued to stress the importance of protecting the especially vulnerable from the costs of transition. Continuing Soviet practice, this group was defined primarily by demographic, not economic, characteristics and included the very young, single-parent families, families with many children, and the retired. Thus, in a decree on social benefits issued in the spring of 1993, Yeltsin raised the one-time payment for the birth of every child, the monthly and quarterly payments to families with children, and the monthly food allowance for all children enrolled in school (Tatyana Khudyakova: 29). It was not until July of 1998 that the law “On State Benefits for Citizens with Children” was amended to restrict payment of such allowances to those families considered most needy.
Despite the official commitment to provide support for raising children, economic constraints made it an increasingly empty promise. A shrinking state budget—due both to declining production and to failure to collect taxes—limited the state’s ability to make payments. Old programs remained officially in existence and new ones were created, but these programs have often not received the necessary funds, even when those funds have technically been budgeted for them (Nick Manning, Ovsey Shkaratan, and Natalya Tikhonova: 59, 212). Responsibility for funding benefits has been passed down to the level of the oblast’, and assistance at that level has been increasingly characterized by reliance on in-kind transfers, primarily because of lack of funds (Mark C. Foley and Jeni Klugman: 194).
At the same time, inflation, which outstripped government measures to adjust the size of payments, quickly reduced the purchasing power of state allowances to virtually nothing. By November of 1995, the Russian newspaper Segodnya commented in an article describing a meeting between President Boris Yeltsin and then Minister of Social Protection of the Population Lyudmila Bezlepkina: “It is not known whether Ms. Bezlepkina told the President that the state allowance per child (38,500 rubles [a month]) is enough for exactly two long pieces of cooked sausage, but many parents wait for months for even that money, along with their wages” (Natalya Gorodetskaya: 9). Despite the small size of these payments, their share in total family income rose in the early 1990s, and at the end of 1996 reached 8.9 percent for truly lone mothers (compared to 6.0 percent for all single-parent families) (Michael Lokshin, Kathleen Mullan Harris, and Barry Popkin: 24). Overall, social transfers constituted 16.7 percent of total monetary income of the population in 1995, up from 14.0 percent in 1992 (Anders Aslund: 139).
If the transition did little to weaken the view that the state should help bear the cost of raising children, it had a much greater impact on women’s role as worker and on the provision of the childcare that made it possible. In the Soviet period, when all enterprises were state-owned, the distinction between benefits provided from the government budget and those provided by places of employment was largely artificial. With Gorbachev’s self-financing reform and Yeltsin’s privatization policies, this distinction became real. Despite strong recommendations from Western advisers and international organizations to do otherwise, in the mid-1990s Russian enterprises—especially those that were the only significant employer in a community—continued to provide such benefits as housing and healthcare to their employees. According to a study carried out by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), however, enterprises were less likely to continue to provide childcare services (Jacques Le Cacheus: 20). Since municipal governments generally lacked the funds to take over these facilities, many were closed. In 1995, there were 658 pre-school slots for every 1,000 children under the age of 7 (Gosudarstvennyi komitet statistiki: 201); by 1999, the number of daycare centers had fallen by 16,000 from the number in 1994 and 1.7 million fewer children were enrolled (Itar-TASS).
Nor has significant easing of other household responsibilities offset the extra effort needed to arrange for childcare. Although the freeing of retail prices has meant that the shortages of consumer goods so characteristic of the Soviet period are less common, shopping remains a much more time-consuming and difficult task than in the United States. Outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, large retail outlets with a wide range of products scarcely exist, and even in the biggest cities people rely heavily on small, specialized kiosks, street vendors, and outdoor markets. Self-service is rare and most stores still operate much as they did in Soviet days, with a single purchase requiring three separate stages—placing the order at a counter, paying in another part of the store, then returning with the receipt to collect the good (Olga Alexeitchik and Yelena Zheberlyaeva: 4; Polina Belkina: 7).
Housing, too, remains a source of frustration. Despite the decline in population, the number of households in Russia has increased, which puts more demand on the housing stock (Maria Lodahl: 195). While there has nonetheless been a marked drop in the number of households on waiting lists, a third of those remaining on the lists have been waiting for over a decade (Lodahl: 195). Lack of an effective credit market puts home purchase or construction far beyond the reach of many, and the essentially free privatization of state-owned apartments has been largely meaningless, since the owners are charged no more than renters of state property for maintenance and are eligible for state housing subsidies on the same grounds as renters (Lodahl: 196 - 7; Nadezhda Kosareva, Andrei Tkachenko, and Raymond Struyk: 156).
Russia Today
While poverty afflicts a great many Russians in all types of families—for the last several years the official figure has fluctuated between about 27 and 40 percent of the population, depending on the period and the method of computation—the proportion of families in this position is unambiguously related to the number of children and is especially high for single-parent families. In the third quarter of 1999, when the poverty rate for all households was 41.9 percent, that for families with children up to the age of 16 was 57.8 percent, and that for single-parent families, which are overwhelmingly female-headed, was 62.7 percent (Cook: 119).
The number of children in single-parent families is increasing. In 1998, 27 percent of births were outside of registered marriages, there were 59.1 divorces per 100 marriages, and one of every seven children under the age of 18 lived in an “incomplete family” (Materialy ministerstva truda i sotsial’nogo razvitiia Rossiiskoi Federatsii; Itar-TASS). At the same time, the share of lone mothers actually living in households with no other adult present is falling, presumably in response to the greater economic difficulty these women face. According to data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Study, in September of 1992, 55.5 percent of single-mother families lived in households without another adult, while 32.4 percent lived with at least one of the parents of the mother; in October of 1996, these proportions were 43.8 percent and 42.0 percent (Lokshin, Harris, and Popkin: 22).
The greater poverty of lone mothers and their children in Russia is due both to the smaller number of wage earners in the family and to the generally poorer earning opportunities for women. The lower wages are in large measure a result of the vertical and horizontal job segregation inherited from the Soviet period, and in particular the heavy concentration of women in sectors like education and public health that have not been privatized. This employment pattern results both in lower wages—official statistics put average earnings of women at 56 percent of the average for men in 2000, down from 70 percent for much of the Soviet period (Nezavisimaya gazeta)—and in a much more serious problem with wage arrears.
Official figures, we know, do not provide an entirely accurate picture of the state of the Russian economy or of the lives of Russian citizens. The unofficial economy, though difficult to measure, is undeniably large. The Minister of Labor and Social Development estimates that “gray economy”—and therefore unreported—wages constitute around 60 percent of earnings (Sergei Kalashnikov). According to a recent article in Moscow News, the millions of poor in Russia, most of whom hold jobs, survive in large measure because of food received from personal plots, often belonging to parents still living in villages (Erlen Bernshtein). The average value of food grown on small plots for personal consumption has been estimated at 250 rubles per family per year (Golovachev), more than the average per capita income of families with four or more children (Materialy ministerstva truda i sotsial’nogo razvitiia Rossiiskoi Federatsii).
These averages are sure to mask considerable variation and may not be representative of the amounts received in families with lone mothers. Lone mothers in Russia participate in the labor force more than married mothers, with labor force participation rates in late 1996 of 81 percent and 71 percent, respectively (Lokshin, Harris, and Popkin: 9), and are unlikely to have time to moonlight in the unofficial economy. Furthermore, they may well resist getting involved in potentially dangerous economic activities in order to protect their children, which would further reduce their income from unofficial sources.
The poverty of lone mothers in Russia today is certainly harsher than that experienced in the late Brezhnev era, but it is not a new phenomenon. In his study of poverty in the Soviet Union, Mervyn Matthews (: 28) used a variety of sociological studies and émigré surveys (since official data on poverty were not published, if indeed they existed) and posited “‘poverty contingents’ of up to two-fifths of all workers and employees’ families, and rather more of the population at large.” Among the groups that Matthews identified as especially likely to experience poverty were women and members of large or “incomplete” families (Matthews: 37 - 9).
One consequence of Russian poverty is the high incidence of nutritional deficiencies and of various infectious diseases associated with low income. Recent studies have found that significant numbers of Russian women are deficient in such nutrients as folic acid, iron, calcium, and some of the B vitamins, and nearly half of pregnant women are malnourished. During the 1990s, there was a decline in the average weight, height, chest size, and muscle strength of Russian children (Alla Malakhova: 1, 5; Alexandre Zouev: 24; Stephen Massey: 2).
To the extent that these health problems are due to inadequate diet, drug use, or sexually transmitted diseases, they can be attributed in large measure to the economic hardships and social dislocations arising from the transition period. Daily per capita caloric intake in Russia fell from 2,589 in 1990 to 2,427 in 1994 (Bertram Silverman and Murray Yanowitch: 26). According to the Russian Ministry of Health, drug use rose by almost 400 percent in the 1990s (Francesca Mereu). Some experts claim that a sharp rise in the mortality rate for children and young women since 1997 is due in large measure to increased prostitution (BBC Monitoring).
Many of the negative trends began well before 1991, however. The sickness rate among Russian newborns climbed from 82.4 per 1,000 in 1981 to 173.7 per 1,000 in 1991, while the incidence of birth defects in the early 1990s was about 15 percent (Nezavisimaya gazeta: 6; Yelena Shafran). Deaths per 1,000 members of the Russian population rose from 7.4 in 1960 to 10.4 in 1986, then, much more rapidly, to 15.7 in 1994 (Gosudarstvennyi komitet SSSR po statistike: 407; Boris Gorzev: 35). Life expectancy at birth for males in Russia fell from 63.1 years in 1969 - 70 to 61.5 in 1979 - 80, then rose to 63.9 in 1990 (possibly because of the anti-alcohol campaigns of Andropov and Gorbachev), before falling sharply to 57.7 in 1994 (Gosudarstvennyi komitet SSSR po statistike: 409; 1991: 94).
Many of the sources of today’s health problems lie in the past. Soviet-era degradation of the environment was responsible for about 20 percent of illnesses in the 1980s, according to a study by the All-Union Central Research Institute for Occupational Safety (D. J. Peterson: 7), and its impact will be felt for generations. Soviet vaccination practices also contributed to current problems. The isolation of Soviet medical researchers from their counterparts in the rest of the world resulted in a distinctive approach to immunology and much lower vaccination rates than deemed desirable in the West. Pediatricians were officially discouraged from giving vaccinations to children with any of a long list of contraindications, very few of which would be considered problems in the West (Laurie Garrett: 4). In 1989, for example, “one-quarter of Soviet children who should have been vaccinated against polio were not; one-fifth were not immunized against diphtheria, and one-third did not get a whooping cough vaccination” (Arthur Hartman).
Inadequacies in the Russian healthcare system make dealing with health problems difficult, and these, though exacerbated by the transition, also have a long history. According to an article published in Nezavisimaya gazeta in 1992,
“one-fourth of all currently operating hospitals were built before 1940. A total of 46 percent of all hospitals and almost one-third of all outpatient clinics need capital repairs. As many as 42 percent of all hospitals and 30 percent of all outpatient clinics have no hot-water supply; 18 percent and 15 percent, respectively, have no sewerage systems; and 12 percent and 7 percent have no water supply at all.” (Nezavisimaya gazeta: 6)
These long-term problems with the physical capital stock have been joined by more recent shortages of personnel (due to low wages and serious wage arrears) and of medicines. Furthermore, because of a shortage of pharmacists, people without the necessary training prepare medicines, and there is a growing problem with fraudulent production (RFE/RL Newsline). Medicines for children are particularly hard to find. According to Aleksandr Baranov, chair of the executive committee of the Russian Pediatricians’ Union, few Russian medicines are available except in adult doses, and foreign medicines, which do come in appropriate doses, are at least twice as expensive; less than 5 percent of the medicines needed for Russian children are currently available (Itar-TASS).
The costs of the country’s poor health fall heavily on Russian women: they suffer poor health themselves, bear the burden of caring for sickly children, and face an increased likelihood of becoming lone mothers because of the high mortality rate for young males. In addition, more very young women are giving birth outside of marriage, and the incidence of premature births is significantly higher for teenaged mothers (Lokshin, Harris, and Popkin: 10).
At a time when Russians are deeply concerned about a shrinking population and when the number of births to married women has been falling, both the absolute number and the share of births to unwed women have been rising. In 1989, 1.87 million babies were born to married women and 291,700 to unmarried women; in 2000, the figures were 912,500 (a 51 percent drop) and 354,300 (a 21 percent increase), respectively (Demoscope Weekly). For women over 40, 35 percent of births are to unmarried women, while for girls between the ages of 15 and 19 almost 20 percent are to those who are not married (Demoscope Weekly).
The trend toward increasing numbers of very young lone mothers is worrisome. Not only are premature births, and the resulting health problems, more common for these women, but their educational achievement is below that of other women in their age group (Lokshin, Harris, and Popkin: 10). With less education, they have fewer employment opportunities and lower incomes; with sicker children, they need more healthcare, and are likely to need more leave time, which makes them unattractive to potential employers.
In these conditions, many lone mothers in Russia simply cannot cope, and end up turning to state-run orphanages. By all reports, over the last decade the number of children in Russian orphanages and boarding schools has risen sharply. The exact numbers are not easy to establish, however, because of ambiguity about the terms used. At the beginning of 1998, official figures indicated that about 600,000 children (or about 22.8 per 1,000 under the age of 18) were not under parental supervision, and of these about a quarter lived in children’s homes or boarding schools, with the number in infant and children’s homes having doubled since 1993 (Otto Latsis; Malakhova). This compares with 8.0 per 1,000 children in the United States living in foster care in 2000 (Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, US Department of Health and Human Services), but international comparisons must be treated with considerable caution because arrangements for the care of children without supervisory parents depend so heavily on cultural norms. The overwhelming majority—some estimates say over 90 percent—of children in Russian orphanages are so-called “social orphans” with at least one living parent. In some cases these children have run away from home to escape abuse or neglect, in others the authorities have terminated parental rights. Of the children entering orphanages each year, however, about 30 percent are brought to the homes by lone mothers no longer able to take care of them (Itar-TASS).
As with poverty and ill health, however, the plight of lone Russian mothers unable to care for their children is not new. In the early period of glasnost’ the Soviet press was full of articles about the large number of institutionalized children and the poor conditions in which they lived. Data presented at a roundtable in 1987 mentioned 284,000 children in state care for the Soviet Union as a whole (Waters: 124). Remarkably, compared to the entire population, this works out to be about the same proportion as for Russia in 1998.
As the number of divorces, deaths among young men, and births outside of marriage increase and concerns about the shrinking Russian population become more intense, it seems probable that lone mothers will face less and less social censure. Surveys suggest that fewer Russians than before disapprove of premarital sex (1upInfo 1996). On the other hand, there are some profoundly conservative groups, such as the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, who have been given greater voice in the new era. While these groups stress the desirability of traditional families, they have also been successful in deterring efforts to increase the availability of sex education and information about contraception, so are unlikely to reduce the incidence of lone mothers in Russia.
Since becoming president, Vladimir Putin has devoted his energies more to tightening control than to fundamentally changing economic or social policies. Despite considerable discussion of the importance of targeting state assistance more carefully, there has been very little change in practice. A poll conducted by VTsIOM (the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion) in late 2001 found that 49 percent of the population receives some type of government benefit, while Deputy Prime Minister for Social Affairs Valentina Matvienko put the share at two-thirds and argued that only a small percentage of these recipients are people with low incomes (RFE/RL Newsline; Alla Startseva). It is difficult, however, to reconcile Matvienko’s latter claim with the data on poverty. The legislature did pass a bill to introduce means-testing for child benefits, but it has proved hard to implement and so far has had little impact (Cook: 121). In any event, most lone mothers would continue to be eligible, given their low incomes.
In the last couple of years the minimum wage has increased modestly, and therefore so have the myriad social benefits, including allowances to lone mothers, based upon this number, but these amounts remain very low. Plans called for raising the minimum wage from about 14 percent of the (unrealistically low) official subsistence minimum in 2000 to 60 percent of the subsistence level in 2002 and 100 percent in 2003, but according to the Minister of Labor such an increase is well beyond the capacity of the government to fund (Startseva). Monthly child support is only 5 percent of the subsistence minimum (Muraviera), and continues to be subject to lengthy delays. As of January of 2002, child allowance arrears were equal to 17 billion rubles (approximately $558 million), a bit higher than the figure for 1998 although considerably lower than the 25.4 billion rubles for 1999 (World Bank Group in Russia).
Wage arrears, too, continue to be a problem, despite some initial success under Putin at reducing them. According to the chair of the State Statistics Committee, wage arrears in June of 2002 were only 40 percent of those in September 1998 (RIA Novosti). They were higher, however, than at the end of 2001, and in July 2002 equaled $101 million, of which over 40 percent were owed to workers in the healthcare sector and over 53 percent to education workers, both groups that are overwhelmingly female (Alex Rodriguez; RFE/RL Newsline; Karpova). Arrears to workers in healthcare and education affect not only the incomes of women, but also the availability of services they need for their children.
Putin has called for “transition to the principle of paying for medical care through insurance,” while recognizing the need to increase government spending on healthcare (Vladimir Putin: 10), but it is clear that problems in this area will not be resolved soon. The Russian Minister of Health, Yurii Shevchenko, argued in mid-2001 that a 50 percent increase in spending was needed in 2002 while the government was planning only a 10 percent increase (RFE/RL Newsline).
There are three areas in which Putin’s policies are likely to have a significant, if not immediate, effect on the lives of lone mothers. First, his tax reform of 2001, which replaced a progressive income tax with a flat 13 percent tax; second, his reduction and gradual elimination of subsidies for housing and municipal services; third, his simplification of registration procedures for small and medium-sized businesses, which went into effect on July 1, 2002, and promises of less intrusive monitoring and regulation of these businesses.
The primary goal of the tax reform was to increase revenues from the abysmally low levels of most of the post-Soviet period. Difficulties collecting taxes have stemmed from the inherited fiscal arrangements among the various levels of government, the hidden nature of most Soviet taxation (and thus the lack of any cultural norm of tax payment) and rampant corruption (greater today but already a serious problem in the late Brezhnev era). Initial results of the reform were mildly encouraging. Speaking in October of 2001, Tax Minister Gennadii Bukaev said that collection in 2001 was 2 percent more of GDP than in 2000 (RFE/RL Newsline). Since the main reason for the inadequate allowances received by lone mothers and others in need in Russia has been the inability of the government budget to fund larger amounts, improved tax revenues could make a considerable difference. While the tax rates are no longer progressive, under the new law single parents receive double the regular tax deduction per child and people with relatively low incomes are entitled to larger standard deductions than are the better off (Ministry of Taxation of the Russian Federation).
Although the plan to bring market reform to the area of communal services over the next decade would seem likely to hurt the poor by significantly increasing the cost of housing and utilities, one of the goals of the reform is better targeting of assistance. If the reforms are indeed accompanied by the promised increase in assistance to those with low income, the net effect for lone mothers could prove to be positive. Still, assistance is contingent upon government priorities and availability of money for these reforms. In addition, these communal service reforms are extremely unpopular, and it is unclear whether Putin will succeed in implementing them.
Reforms in the small business sector should be unambiguously beneficial to lone mothers, if indeed they are implemented as intended at the local level. Not only would these reforms increase the tax base and increase the opportunity for women to start their own small businesses, but they should also make shopping for goods and services easier, since small businesses in Russia tend to be concentrated in trade and catering. At least as important as simplification of registration procedures is the idea of reducing the degree of state monitoring. According to Irina Khakamada, who was appointed as head of the State Committee for the Support and Development of Small Business in 1997 and is now deputy chair of the Duma, inspections are a particular problem for female entrepreneurs, who tend to experience about twice as many visits—around fifty each year—from government officials (or those who claim to hold such positions) as do male entrepreneurs (Nora Boustany).
Conclusion
Life for lone mothers in Russia today is indeed hard, but many of the difficulties they face have their roots deep in the Soviet period. The shortage of housing and the health consequences arising from environmental degradation are clearly the result of Soviet-era policies, while the difficulties the federal government encounters in collecting taxes to fund assistance programs stem both from the inherited administrative structure and from attitudes instilled in the earlier period. While lone mothers are not the only segment of the population to be affected by these legacies, they are more likely to be operating at the limits of what they can manage in terms of both time and money and are therefore likely to be more seriously hurt.
The transition to a new economic and political system has of course also played an important role. What is apparent, however, is that the problems do not arise from a change in the state’s official commitment to women as mothers. There has been remarkably little erosion in the belief that the state is responsible for ensuring that the basic needs of the population are met, and correspondingly little change in welfare legislation since 1991 (Cook). In particular, the state has not retreated from its view of children as public goods, nor has it retreated in principle from its responsibility for providing healthcare and education to the population.
What has changed is the state’s attitude toward employment. It has abandoned its commitment to over-full employment and its desire to ensure high labor force participation rates for women, and this has resulted in far fewer and less affordable childcare facilities. For some married women in Russia this may have provided welcome encouragement to stay at home and escape the dual burden; for the increasing number of lone mothers it has made the burden that much heavier.