Russia (and Soviet Union)

Agricultural Model

Peasants' reproductive behavior followed the patterns of universal marriage and natural marital fertility, resulting in a total fertility rate of 10 to 12 children per woman over her lifetime, which was among the highest in Europe. Since much of the labor-producing family subsistence was located on the land, each mother's farm work was indispensable to the family economy.

During the agricultural season the need for mothers' hands in the fields was so great that a woman was typically back to work three days after she gave birth, while childcare was left to other family members, most often to grandmothers and older children. The double burden of motherhood and agricultural labor resulted in a high infant mortality rate, which at the end of the 19th century stood at approximately 280 per 1,000 live births for children in their first year.

However, there existed substantial ethnic and religious variations of the agricultural model, like those examined by David L. Ransel in the Volga region in rural Russia. Mothers from ethnic Russian (Orthodox Christian) families introduced solid food to infants in the form of water-pap from day one, as their labor patterns prevented the baby from surviving on breastmilk alone.

Women from Tatar and Bashkir (Muslim) villages, who lived side-by-side with Russians, practiced breastfeeding their children for at least one full year, and their customs allowed women more rest after childbirth. These cultural variations resulted in a huge discrepancy in infant survival rates: 82 percent for Tatars and Bashkirs and only 72 percent for Russians.

Industrial Model

The advent of industrialization in the 1880s and the 1890s, when increasing numbers of peasants moved to the cities to work in the factories, unsettled the traditional patriarchal family, triggered a decline in marital fertility, and largely accounted for the emergence of single mothers as a social stratum. Women made up 25 percent of the labor force in 1880s, and fully 40 percent in 1914. Working conditions in early factories, which were unsanitary and had no provisions for either pregnancy or nursing, had negative effects on working-class mothers' capacity to take care of their children.

Hence, the infant mortality rate among the Russian working class was the highest in Europe: according to various estimates, from one half to two thirds of the babies of Russian workers died before they reached the age of 1. The extremely high infant mortality rate became a matter of national concern at the turn of and during the first decade of the 20th century, giving rise to a public movement seeking to improve the well-being of working mothers and children through a network of maternity hospitals, shelters for destitute mothers, milk stations, and baby clinics. However, this movement was limited to large cities and had little to no impact on the rural population.

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