In an announcement last week, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, renewed the Soviet-era title of “Mother Heroine” due to the demographic crisis and the downfall in the birthrates.
Putin signed a decree stating that women who give birth to 10 or more children will be honored with the title of “Mother Heroine”. As per local reports, the women given the title would also receive a payment of 1 million rubles after the 10th child is a year old.
The award requires the children to be given “appropriate level of care for health, education, physical, spiritual and moral development,” said news broadcaster CNBC. It added that qualifying women will undergo an assessment process, but no further details have been released about it.
The report also stated the mother will be awarded if any of her children are martyred in battle, killed in a terrorist attack or an emergency.
This revived decree was first initiated by the Soviet leader Josef Stalin in 1944 to deal with the population crisis in World War II. The title was dissolved with the decline of the Soviet Union after the Cold War came to an end in 1991.
Russia’s population has been at a constant- declining rate, coming down to 145.1 million after a decline of 400,000 at the beginning of 2022. The country’s demography has been falling drastically since the 1990s, and President Putin has encountered issues including the poor conditions of economy and social climate since 2000.
The fall in Russia’s demography has left economists worrying about what impact a small workforce would have on the economy. In 2018, the country’s population was estimated to be about 147 million- including Crimea, with a population of 86,000.
With the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, the declining rate of Russia’s population has grown twice as fast as it was before the pandemic. Russia is now heading towards the largest natural population decline if not controlled soon.
