Demographics of Youth in Russia

Ch. 7. P. 123–143.

Zakharov S. V., Mitrofanova E.

The life course is becoming more flexible and more amenable to personal adjustment for contemporary youth. The process and timing of entering adulthood is expanding due to longer education and the search for oneself. Young people in contemporary Russia do not rush to acquire social statuses that were once so desirable in Soviet times, i.e. that of a parent, employee, and family person. Today, prestige is based on acquiring a good education and career, processes on which they are betting (Blum et al., 2009: 158–159).

Young people also have very specific demands for quality: quality of life, quality of intimate relations, and quality of parenting. All of this has motivated young people to ceaselessly look for an appropriate job, home, partner, and to invest in their children, preferring quality to quantity.

Efficient family-planning tools have separated marital, reproductive, and sexual behavior, transforming these into three different spheres of self-fulfillment. All of these stages, now stretched out through time, reflect individual needs and perspectives. The increasing dispersal of timing of marital relations and childbearing reveals that young people are postponing important demographic events further and further.

 Russians have only recently acquired the opportunity to efficiently manage the most prolific period of their lives — youth. They attempt to start planning their lives as early as possible and to construct it sequentially in a personally tailored way.

Keywords: демография, молодежь, БРИКС, demography, youth, BRICS

Publication based on the results of: Recent demographic trends in Russia and their consideration in socioeconomic forecasting (2013)

In book

Handbook of the Sociology of Youth in BRICS Countries

World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd, 2018.