Paper short abstract:

The paper helps us better understand a relatively uncontested adoption of neoliberal reforms in post-Soviet Russia by exploring the resonance of current international neoliberal regimes of knowledge with local and historically situated models of political subjectivity.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decade, in an orchestrated effort to combat the country’s shrinking population, the Russian government launched a new pronatalist policy offering women a one-time monetary incentive to have multiple children. Compatible with a larger neoliberal regime of knowledge that arrived in Russia in the wake of the Soviet Union, this policy imagines Russian citizens as subjects calculating costs and benefits of their reproductive decisions. Although consistent with a globalized neoliberal regime of knowledge, this paper cautions against reducing the discourse that circumscribes new post-Soviet policies to contemporary neoliberal processes emanating exclusively from the West. While flows of knowledge arriving from the “West” indeed continue affecting national policies and the ways people in the former Soviet Union imagine themselves and others, this paper is interested in the impact local knowledge, and in particular academic expertise and political ideology during the late Soviet period, have had on the production of post-Soviet population policies. Focusing on a case study of a network of social actors and institutions involved in demographic research and population policies in the Soviet Union, the paper explores the continuities between the current neoliberal and a historically distinct – socialist – form of government. It reveals how the transformations occurring in the Soviet discipline of demography as well as the shifting power relations between the state and its academic experts laid out a foundation for the post-Soviet state discourse in which individual behavior and an entrepreneurial self have become important concepts with which political agendas are advanced and transformed. The paper helps us better understand a relatively uncontested adoption of neoliberal reforms in post-Soviet Russia by exploring the resonance of current international neoliberal regimes of knowledge with local and historically situated models of political subjectivity.