Abstract
The discourse on the demographic crisis in contemporary Russia resonates with a neoliberal political project that attempts to govern populations through the market logic of optimization, responsibilization, and efficacy. Yet, as this article argues, the basic categories of the discourse, although evocative of a new neoliberal rationality, were in fact born of epistemological changes that took place in the Soviet science of population in the last decades of the USSR. Specifically, the analytical shift from Marxist-Leninist demography, which stressed a strong economic determinism, to the concept of demographic behavior, which became central to the discipline's analytical toolkit in the late Soviet period, produced political ideas in which individual behavior became both the core of the population problem and its solution. The article follows these institutional and conceptual transformations and shows how knowledge produced by Soviet demographers in that period continues to provide the foundation for neoliberal state efforts to solve the population problem. When seen from a historical perspective, the neoliberal character of the new population policies loses its apparent ideological and political coherence.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 149-172 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Slavic Review |
| Volume | 78 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Slavic Review History and Afterlife of Soviet Demography Leykin Inna I nna L eykin is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University of Israel. She studies the interactions between the cultures of intellectual expertise and policymaking, democratic transformations in postsocialist countries, and emerging practices of the self in contemporary Russia. Her research explores how post-Soviet demographic reality came to be conceived as a dramatic national problem and as an object of government intervention and popular concern. This essay has benefited from the close reading and comments of Michele Rivkin-Fish, Michal Kravel-Tovi, Erica Weiss, Yifat Gutman, and Tom Pessah. I am also grateful to audiences at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, both in Tel Aviv University, and at the 49 th Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies for their helpful critical comments on earlier drafts. Research for this article was supported by the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. I would also like to thank The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University for funding portions of this research and writing. I am particularly grateful to Harriet Murav, whose intellectual generosity and editorial guidance was invaluable in helping me strengthen the essay; and to the anonymous reviewers who offered perceptive and productive guidance for revision. 03 05 2019 Spring 2019 78 1 149 172 Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019 2019 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies The discourse on the demographic crisis in contemporary Russia resonates with a neoliberal political project that attempts to govern populations through the market logic of optimization, responsibilization, and efficacy. Yet, as this article argues, the basic categories of the discourse, although evocative of a new neoliberal rationality, were in fact born of epistemological changes that took place in the Soviet science of population in the last decades of the USSR. Specifically, the analytical shift from Marxist-Leninist demography, which stressed a strong economic determinism, to the concept of demographic behavior, which became central to the discipline's analytical toolkit in the late Soviet period, produced political ideas in which individual behavior became both the core of the population problem and its solution. The article follows these institutional and conceptual transformations and shows how knowledge produced by Soviet demographers in that period continues to provide the foundation for neoliberal state efforts to solve the population problem. When seen from a historical perspective, the neoliberal character of the new population policies loses its apparent ideological and political coherence. pdf S0037677919000123a.pdf
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.