Nine months ago, Russians celebrated Baby-Making Day . They didn’t call it that, exactly, but the propaganda was no less subtle: “Remember the mammoths?” said the speakers at a reproductive youth camp known as Nashi. “They became extinct because they didn’t have enough sex. That must not happen in Russia.”
In a country where SIM cards outnumber people , the birthrate has fallen to 1.26 , the population is declining by 700,000 each year , and humans are looking like the next endangered species, there is no better way to celebrate today, the national holiday of Russia, than by spending it in the hospital delivery room. You might remember the news story from last September 12: “Procreating for the motherland” became the battle-cry of Russia, as youth flocked to love-camps and government officials encouraged couples to skip work and be more productive—or reproductive—at home.
Nine months is a long time to prepare for today’s holiday, but those who have stuck with it will be rewarded—and rewarded well. The central Russian province of Ulyanovsk, for instance, is offering valuable prizes to women giving birth today—from TVs and refrigerators to even new jeeps and houses. And they’re not even gender-discriminatory about the outcome. Says a member of the Ulyanovsk press office: “It doesn’t matter if it’s a girl or a boy.”
So far, the scheme seems to be successful—the number of babies born on June 12 increased threefold last year at the main Ulyanovsk regional hospital, and the numbers are still due for 2008.
It is good to see something of a reversal in (or at least questioning of) the pervasive and longstanding pro-abortion, anti-childbirth mentality in Eastern Europe. Yet I can’t help being haunted by thoughts of the Stalinist “Medals of Maternal Glory”—transmuting procreation from a sacred act to a national service—or, eerily similar, George Orwell’s descriptions of the sterile world of 1984 baby-making. It’s “our duty to the Party,” explained Winston’s partner Katherine .
“Our duty to the party,” is the tagline of today, with one small addendum: “I pick the black jeep.”
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