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Soviet Union [USSR] Family Size
Family size and composition depended mainly on the place of
residence--urban or rural--and ethnic group. The size and
composition of such families was also influenced by housing and
income limitations, pensions, and female employment outside the
home. The typical urban family consisted of a married couple, two
children, and, in about 20 percent of the cases, one of the
grandmothers, whose assistance in raising the children and in
housekeeping was important in the large majority of families having
two wage earners. Rural families generally had more children than
urban families and often supported three generations under one
roof. Families in Central Asia and the Caucasus tended to have more
children than families elsewhere in the Soviet Union and included
grandparents in the family structure. In general, the average
family size has followed that of other industrialized countries,
with higher income families having both fewer children and a lower
rate of infant mortality. From the early 1960s to the late 1980s,
the number of families with more than one child decreased by about
50 percent and in 1988 totaled 1.9 million. About 75 percent of the
families with more than one child lived in the southern regions of
the country, half of them in Central Asia. In the Russian,
Ukrainian, Belorussian, Moldavian, Estonian, Latvian, and
Lithuanian republics, families with one and two children
constituted more than 90 percent of all families, whereas in
Central Asia those with three or more children ranged from 14
percent in the Kirgiz Republic to 31 percent in the Tadzhik
Republic. Surveys suggested that most parents would have had more
children if they had had more living space.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, the government promoted family
planning in order to slow the growth of the Central Asian
indigenous populations. Local opposition to this policy surfaced
especially in the Uzbek and Tadzhik republics. In general, however,
the government continued publicly to honor mothers of large
families. Women received the Motherhood Medal, Second Class, for
their fifth live birth and the Heroine Mother medal for their
tenth. Most of these awards went to women in Central Asia and the
Caucasus (see
table 21, Appendix A).
Data as of May 1989
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