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I'm Maxim Polyakov, a correspondent for the online magazine '7x7'.

For the past 18 years, Russian authorities have actively promoted increased childbirth. In 2006, Vladimir Putin addressed a demographic decline, and the following year, the government introduced its first incentive for childbirth—maternity capital. This is a one-time payment for the birth of a second child, which can be used to purchase a home, pay for the child’s education, or other expenses. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the government’s stance has hardened, shifting from incentives to restrictions. Private clinics in five Russian regions have fully or partially ceased performing abortions after discussions with local officials. Ten regional governments have introduced fines for “encouraging abortions,” and the Ministry of Health has restricted sales of certain emergency contraceptives. The Supreme Court has also designated the LGBTQ movement as extremist.

Following these actions, the state has turned its focus to combating the so-called “childfree ideology” and citizens unwilling to have and raise their own children. The motivation behind this is clear: the country seeks future taxpayers, workers, and soldiers. In this newsletter, I’ll explain when the term “childfree ideology”—coined by authorities specifically for legislative purposes—came into use and how the state has been working to combat it over the past two decades.

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Vera’s Story

When Vera was five, her kindergarten teacher took her by the hand and led her to join the other girls playing house. Vera didn’t like this game but decided not to argue with the teacher.

“I’ll be the dad!” Vera announced, much to the delight of the other girls. None of them wanted to play the dad.

Vera grabbed a chair, sat down with a book, and declared, “Dad is back from work and is going to rest.” She spent the entire game sitting in the chair with her book. That evening, she overheard the teacher scolding her mother, accusing her of raising Vera incorrectly and saying the child lacked maternal instincts.

Forty years later, Vera lives in a city in the Urals and runs her own law firm. Recently, she and her husband celebrated their 14th wedding anniversary. They don’t have kids, nor do they plan to.

Vera has known since childhood that she didn’t want to be a mother. Once, she asked her mom, “Why did you have me?” It was an earnest question, as she genuinely wanted to understand why adults were interested in having children.

“I’ve always found kids boring: they cry, they don’t understand anything,” Vera recalls. “When my friends had younger siblings, I felt sorry for them.”

Vera emphasizes that she has nothing against children and is eager to help if she sees one in trouble. She even volunteered for several years at a local pediatric oncology center.

“I just don’t want kids of my own,” she explains. “Nothing good will come from a child realizing they were born not because I wanted them, but because of societal pressure.”

The term childfree first appeared in Russia in the early 2000s. While it’s hard to pinpoint the exact timing, the first mentions surfaced on LiveJournal—one of the most popular online platforms in Russia at the time—in December 2004. A Russian-speaking childfree community soon emerged there, with members discussing their reasons for not wanting children.

Over time, the term childfree became a subject of academic research. Initially, it was studied as part of modern slang, but it later gained recognition as a distinct phenomenon closely tied to demographics and evolving family concepts.

Have More Children!

After the USSR collapsed, authorities introduced a program called Family Planning. Its aim was to reduce the number of abortions by expanding contraceptive options and adding sex education to school curriculums. Launched in 1993, the program faced opposition just four years later, in 1997, when activists from the movement For the Moral Renaissance of the Homeland publicly petitioned to end its federal funding. Members of other conservative groups vandalized billboards displaying contraceptive ads.

The program’s funding was subsequently halted in 1998, with the state claiming that contraceptives were part of an enemy conspiracy intended to weaken Russia’s demographic strength.

In 2003, Russian authorities reduced the number of social grounds for abortion from 13 to just 4. Three years later, Vladimir Putin voiced concerns over the country’s demographic situation, warning, “If we do nothing, by the end of the 21st century, Russia’s population will have halved.”

Researcher Anna Sidorevich considers this the start of a period she characterizes as Putin’s pronatalism—a policy approach in which the government seeks to address the demographic crisis by restricting women’s reproductive rights.

Emergence of the Movement’s “Founder”

In 2013, Edward Lisovsky from Saint Petersburg noticed that an unknown individual had sent him photos on VKontakte. Strangers often insulted him online with messages like, “I have three children, and you’re a dickhead,” and “A bastard like you should be dead.” However, this time, the young man was genuinely frightened, as the photos showed him from behind.

Edward chose not to respond. An hour later, the stranger wrote that they knew where Lisovsky drank his coffee in the morning. The conversation ended with the phrase, “Watch your back.”

Since 2012, Edward Lisovsky had been creating and developing communities on VKontakte with the goal of selling advertisements. He had a network of public groups dedicated to topics like computer games, movies, Apple products, and more.

One day, while browsing comments to find an idea for a new themed community, Edward saw a post from a young woman who complained about her mother pressuring her to have children.

In response, Edward created a community for people who didn’t want to become parents, calling it Childfree. In the first week, the group gained 3,000 members. Within a month, it grew to 150,000, and by the following year, 2013, it had reached 1 million subscribers.

“I believe there was a significant social demand [for this kind of community],” Edward says. “Back then, I received many messages like, ‘Thanks to your community, I realized that I’m not the only one being pressured into having children.’”

Lisovsky explains that the core idea of the community wasn’t that having children is bad. On the contrary, it emphasized that becoming parents is best when you have the financial resources, a healthy relationship with your partner, and a genuine desire to do so—not because of societal pressure or stereotypes.

He was unable to sell advertisements in the Childfree community, as advertisers couldn’t figure out what to offer to such an audience.

Various Russian-language resources, including Wikipedia, list Edward Lisovsky as the founder of the childfree movement. However, he himself believes that childfree cannot truly be called a movement, as there is no organizational structure.

Olga Shnyrova, head of the Ivanovo Centre for Gender Studies, agrees, drawing a comparison between childfree individuals in Russia and the United States: “In the U.S., there were various organizations and associations that united childfree people. This has never existed in Russia.”

For Edward Lisovsky, childfree is more of an ideology, a perspective on life.

“I used to think that I didn’t want to have children, but now I have a son. I have no connection to the childfree movement anymore. I don’t run any public groups, and I just want to live a peaceful life.”

In 2013, VKontakte blocked the Childfree community at the request of the prosecutor’s office in Saint Petersburg.

Despite this, the Russian authorities rarely addressed the childfree movement in the 2010s. In 2015, State Duma deputy and defender of "traditional values" Vitaly Milonov asked the Ministry of Health to study the childfree phenomenon and determine whether it was a deviation from the psychiatric norm for an adult. However, Milonov's proposal did not progress further.

In 2021, the Saint Petersburg deputy resumed his criticism of childfree. He appeared on the Doc.Talk show on Channel One alongside Edward Lisovsky and claimed that every girl "dreams of a baby" before falling asleep.

That same year, Edward Lisovsky temporarily left Russia after a friend in the security services warned him that the authorities were planning to designate the childfree movement as extremist.

Lisovsky believes he became the "founder" of the childfree movement by mistake. When Milonov raised the issue, journalists often called Lisovsky for comments, and media reports gradually turned him from "the creator of a childfree community" into "the founder of the childfree movement."

The government resumed discussions about banning childfree in February 2022. Senator Margarita Pavlova announced that the Federation Council had proposed including childfree content on the list of unlawful materials that could be blocked without a court ruling. Exactly one year later, in 2023, State Duma deputies introduced a bill suggesting a ban on the distribution of information "promoting voluntary refusal to have children" among minors.

War and Children

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Russian authorities have been making efforts to boost the birth rate. In 2023, deputies and officials at various levels began restricting women’s access to abortion: some private clinics stopped terminating pregnancies under pressure from local authorities.

Government officials frequently discuss the prestige of childbirth in meetings and public speeches. For example, in 2023, the Minister of Health Mikhail Murashko stated that a woman should have a child first and only then focus on her education. Senator Margarita Pavlova believes that young women "should not be oriented toward pursuing higher education" at all, as it undermines their reproductive function.

“As the state sees it, women are obligated to give birth to new soldiers in any society during wartime. Those who refuse to follow this model are seen as a threat to the national idea,” adds Olga Shnyrova.

Statistics clearly show that the war in Ukraine has led Russians to delay having children. According to Rosstat, in 2023, there were 1.264 million births, one of the lowest figures recorded in the past 24 years. A similar number was last seen in 1999, when there were just 1.214 million births. Rosstat forecasts that the birth rate will continue to decline until 2027, after which it is expected to rise.

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