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Soviet Union [USSR] Marriage, Divorce, and the Family
As early as the mid-1970s, open acknowledgment and frank
discussions of demographic problems in the Soviet Union began to
take place. The family, as "the key social unit," was at the center
of these discussions. For many years, population growth was taken
for granted. In the 1970s, however, authorities became concerned
about declining birth rates in the European part of the Soviet
Union, especially among Russians. In addition to urbanization and
industrialization, other factors affecting family size were rising
divorce rates, an acute shortage of housing, and poor health care.
Another factor was that Slavic weomen had the world's highest
abortion rates.
The Twenty-Fifth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1976 was the first to recognize that the
Soviet Union had a demographic problem, and it proposed measures to
deal with "the aggravation of the demographic situation." Two key
areas pertaining to the family were mentioned as contributing to an
intensification of population problems: the lowering of birth rates
to levels below those necessary for replacement and for
guaranteeing an adequate supply of labor; and continuing high rates
of divorce. The Twenty-Sixth Party Congress (1981) and the TwentySeventh Party Congress (1986) established a pronatalist policy that
probably accounted for a slight upswing in fertility as the decade
progressed.
In the 1970s and 1980s, some population problems were
associated with a developmental trend that the socialist system had
traditionally encouraged, i.e., urbanization and industrialization.
The demographic price for this process is normally paid in
declining birth rates and shrinking family sizes. An efficient
modern economy ordinarily can adjust to a smaller work force. The
Soviet economy, however, has remained relatively labor intensive in
the key agricultural and industrial sectors, and as a result there
were labor shortages in many of the larger cities.
The 1979 census registered more than 66 million families; by
the mid-1980s there were about 70 million families. In 1979 the
overwhelming majority (86.2 percent) of urban families consisted of
two to four members. In the urban areas of the European part, in
particular, the trend was to limit the number of children to two
and in many cases to only one. In 1979 about 60 percent of the
families with children under eighteen years of age had only one
child; 33 percent had two children. The negative consequences of
this trend, especially in the European part of the country, led the
government to begin an active campaign to encourage families to
have a third child.
Data as of May 1989
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