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 an honour and a joy,” Vera Asachyova told Sky News when asked how it felt to win.
“Our family is proud, only my husband and me, but for young people and their grandparents and grandparents. “
And that is not your only price.
Having had so many children, they were also venerated with the prestigious order of parental glory, which Vera proudly wears on her chest.
The family’s radiant faces are even on the city’s billboards.
They’re portrayed as the model family doing their patriotic duty.
In fact, Russia’s birth rate is a quarter-century decline and the other state rates to meet Asachyov’s example.
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 figures it “catastrophic” and is desperate to stimulate 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 is there this propaganda? Even if this is the case, are there really more pressing reasons why a woman might not need to have children?
For example, the prices involved, or perhaps because your spouse is fighting in Ukraine, or worse, killed there.
I put this in Tatiana Voutskaya, a deputy from Russia’s ruling United Russia party, who is on the Parliamentary Committee for the Protection of the Circle of Relatives.
“It’s an ideological life on earth,” he replied, referring to the so-called propaganda.
“If [our parents] had joined this ideology, none of us would be in this press convention today. Maybe it would be other people here and even robots. “
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 lived in combination for 30 years and only gave birth to a single child. There is something that goes there. “
According to the authorities, propaganda without young people is, in films, on the Internet and in the media. But that is not what it is to walk in Moscow.
Almost anywhere you look, there are massive billboards selling a circle of relatives and motherhood. The message on one can be read “We have room to grow” in Russian.
Russia insists that women still have the right not to have children, but feminist activists such as Zalina Marshenkulova, this is no longer true.
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,” he told Sky News, referring to the prohibition of propaganda without children. “This is a repressive law that needed to turn all women into mechanisms for slave replica.
“If you are intelligent, if you like freedom, if you respect yourself, you live in Russia. This is what they are looking to tell us through this stupid law. “
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A low birth rate is the only demographic challenge in Russia, of course. It also has a building in the mortality rate, annoying through the war in Ukraine.
War stops would stimulate the population. But it is not disputed.
Apparently, propaganda without young people is the biggest problem.