Pandemic sees boom in divorces in Russia

In 2021 there were 100,000 more. The Republic of Tatarstan seems to be the only exception in the entire Federation. The drop in the birth rate continues. Young people are less committed and are not having children. Expert: "Families are not formed online".

Moscow (AsiaNews) - An investigation by the website Idel.Realii reveals that the Covid-19 pandemic has seriously challenged the family life of Russians. Already in mid-2020, following the first quarantine, the number of cases of domestic violence had increased by two and a half times, and were reported more rarely, precisely because of the lack of mutual social control.

Divorces, on the other hand, seemed to be decreasing, mainly because in 2020 it was almost impossible to go to the municipality to sign the separation documents. The data for 2021 actually show that the number of divorces in Russia, one of the highest in the world statistically for many years, has further increased.

The survey does not collect data from the entire Federation, but mainly from the long territory of the Oltrevolga, one of the country's theoretically most "traditionalist" areas, where in times past "old believers" opposed to any religious reform and other communities wishing to live sheltered from change took refuge.

The only area in which family life has been positively evaluated seems to be the Republic of Tatarstan, according to local registry office staff, who boast of a growth in large families and a statistical decrease in deaths, as well as a general increase in marriages, but the data leaves many doubts, since they have not been submitted to the control of the National Institute of Statistics Rosstat.

The head of the civil registry office in Tatarstan, Gulmat Nigmatullina, emphasises the decrease in divorces in families with underage children: "This is the best data in the entire Russian Federation, since 80% of divorces are decided by the courts, which award conciliation procedures. We are committed to using all possibilities to defend the family".

However, the number of divorces in 2021 is not published, "we publish it every two years", Nigmatullina says. Of the five regions of the Oltrevolga, Tatarstan is the only one to declare the positive curve of family solidity, perhaps for propaganda reasons, at a time when the country is asserting its ethnic-religious identity and relying heavily on traditional values.

It is a different story in neighbouring regions, starting with Bashkortostan, where the population is also of Tatar-Asian origin, although more mixed and less demanding. In the Ufa region, marriages have risen slightly since 2020 - 23,000 compared to 19,000 - but divorces have increased, from 15,000 to 14,000.

There were 1,847 fewer children born in 2021 and almost 3,000 fewer than in 2019. Similar figures in Chuvashia, with 1,000 more divorces and 600 fewer children, and in Udmurtia (+500 divorces, -272 children). In the Samara region, marriages increased (+3,000 in 2021), but so did divorces (+400), with 448 fewer children.

In the whole Russian Federation, 923,553 marriages were registered in 2021, 150,000 more than in the previous year, while divorces numbered 644,207, 100,000 more than in the first year of the pandemic. In the last three years, the birth rate in Russia has decreased significantly: 1,484,517 children in 2019, 50,000 fewer in 2020 and 1,404,834 in 2021. In 2021, almost 15% of families will break up.

The president of the Foundation for Social Research, Vladimir Zvonovsky, observes that "the phenomenon of the decrease in marriages and births is not only Russian, mainly due to the fact that the civil registration and ecclesiastical celebration of unions is increasingly losing its meaning for the younger generations, who are also having fewer and fewer children as a result of less commitment".

This is linked to many factors, including the average lengthening of life and social protection that make the need to build a family less pressing. The birth of children is less and less linked to marriage, and future generations grow up without the sense of this sacred and civil union.

As Zvonovsky reminds us, "families are not formed on the Internet". The Soviet socialist state aimed to replace the family with social control over births and the growth of future generations, while today future life is entrusted to absolute uncertainty on a personal and social level, where the pandemic seems to have given the decisive push to break every scheme.