Sergei Zakharov
Biography
Sergei V. Zakharov is professor in demography and former vice-director of the Institute of Demography at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow, Russia (2007 - 2022). He is editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal ‘Demographic Review’. During his USIAS Fellowship, he will be hosted by Professor Didier Breton in the unit Society, Stakeholders and Governments in Europe (SAGE) at the University of Strasbourg. His research focuses on Russia’s demographic history, fertility, and family policy in comparative international and historical perspectives.
Dr. Zakharov was born in Moscow, Russia where he obtained his MA degree cum laude from the Moscow Institute of Economics and Statistics (1981) before completing a PhD at the Institute of Socio-Economic Studies of Population of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ISESP RAS) in 1991. In 2022, he was research fellow at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study (France) and, from 2023-2025, laureate of the French PAUSE programme - that enables institutes to host scientists in exile - at the University of Strasbourg.
He is author of over 220 academic works in Russian, English, French, German, Chinese and Italian, including Population and Development Review, The Lancet, Demographic Research, Comparative Population Studies, Population, UN Population Bulletin. He is co-author in Demographic Modernization in Russia, 1900-2000 (2006); The Waning World Power: the demographic future of Russia and other Soviet successor states (2011); Annual Report “Population of Russia” (1993-2020, editor in 1993, 2015-2020). He teaches courses on demographic methodology, fertility analysis, world population problems and has supervised 29 MA and 2 PhD theses.
Fellowship 2025
Dates - 01/09/2025-31/08/2027
Project summary
THE HISTORY OF FERTILITY IN RUSSIA: A STUDY OF LONG-TERM CHANGES IN QUANTUM AND STRUCTURAL CHARACTERISTICS OF FERTILITY ACROSS GENERATIONS IN THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURIES
The goal of this project is to establish the first demographic and sociological analysis of the history of fertility in Russia from the late 19th century to the present. Drawing on over thirty years of research by the author and the opportunity to conduct new data analyses, this project will result in a monograph detailing the historical evolution of fertility in Russia as a demographic process closely related to historical changes in society, economy, family, social and family policies throughout the 20th century and in the first decades of the 21st century. The book will both describe fundamental shifts in people’s demographic behaviour and reveal their relationship to the political and economic crises and catastrophes that accompanied these changes: the revolutions and civil war of 1917-1922; the tragic era of the accelerated construction of communism in the 1930s-1940s and the associated mass repressions; several periods of famine; the Second World War; the revolution and economic crisis in the late 1980s - early 1990s; the construction of a new authoritarian and repressive society in the first decades of the 21st century; the Russian-Ukrainian war and the corresponding global political crisis in the 2020s.
The question of how demographic behaviour evolves, and the impacts of political and economic processes on fertility dynamics, has been thoroughly politicized by Russia’s political elite. Since 2006, the Putin administration has introduced explicitly pronatalist policies through a range of material incentives for childbearing, neotraditionalist ideological instruction, and restrictions of reproductive rights. Underlying these policies is the assumption that low fertility results from the erosion of the value of family life, both morally and economically. The current project provides a comprehensive quantitative analysis of the fertility dynamics, documenting and explaining how demographic data illuminate the empirical process of family formation in Russia over time. It identifies historical stages in the state’s changing attitude towards the family and the individual with regard to family formation, marriage, and childbearing. Importantly, analysis demonstrates the impacts of varying family policies on childbearing as the state’s ideological pendulum shifted between greater or lesser state paternalism, personal freedom, and ideals of (neo)-traditionalism and nationalism.
