(blue) from 1961 to 2009 as well as projection (dotted blue) from 2010 to 2100 Excess deaths throughout
World War I and the
Russian Civil War (including the
famine of 1921–1922 that was triggered by Lenin's
war communism policies) amounted to a combined total of 18 million, some 10 million in the 1930s, and more than 20 million in 1941–1945. The postwar
Soviet population was 45 to 50 million smaller than it would have been if pre-war demographic growth had continued. According to
Catherine Merridale, '...reasonable estimate would place the total number of excess deaths for the whole period somewhere around 60 million.' The
birth rate of the USSR decreased from 44.0 per thousand in 1926 to 18.0 in 1974, mainly due to increasing urbanization and the rising average age of marriages. The
mortality rate demonstrated a gradual decrease as well—from 23.7 per thousand in 1926 to 8.7 in 1974. In general, the birth rates of the southern republics in Transcaucasia and Central Asia were considerably higher than those in the northern parts of the Soviet Union, and in some cases even increased in the post–World War II period, a phenomenon partly attributed to slower rates of urbanization and traditionally earlier marriages in the southern republics. Soviet Europe moved towards
sub-replacement fertility, while
Soviet Central Asia continued to exhibit population growth well above replacement-level fertility. The late 1960s and the 1970s witnessed a reversal of the declining trajectory of the rate of mortality in the USSR, and was especially notable among men of working age, but was also prevalent in Russia and other predominantly Slavic areas of the country. An analysis of the official data from the late 1980s showed that after worsening in the late-1970s and the early 1980s, adult mortality began to improve again. The infant mortality rate increased from 24.7 in 1970 to 27.9 in 1974. Some researchers regarded the rise as mostly real, a consequence of worsening health conditions and services. The rises in both adult and infant mortality were not explained or defended by Soviet officials, and the
Soviet government stopped publishing all mortality statistics for ten years. Soviet demographers and health specialists remained silent about the mortality increases until the late-1980s, when the publication of mortality data resumed, and researchers could delve into the real causes.
Urbanism The Soviet Union imposed heavy controls on city growth, preventing some cities from reaching their full potential while promoting others. For the entirety of the Soviet Union's existence, the most populous cities were
Moscow and
Leningrad (both in
Russian SFSR), with the third far place taken by
Kiev (
Ukrainian SSR). At the USSR's inception, the fourth and fifth most populous cities were
Kharkov (Ukrainian SSR) and
Baku (
Azerbaijan SSR), but, by the end of the century,
Tashkent (
Uzbek SSR), which had assumed the position of capital of Soviet Central Asia, had risen to fourth place.
Minsk (
Byelorussian SSR) saw rapid growth during the 20th century, rising from the 32nd most populous in the union to the 7th.
Women and fertility , the first woman in space, visiting the
Lvov confectionery, Ukrainian SSR, 1967 Under Lenin, the state made explicit commitments to promote the
equality of men and women. Many early Russian feminists and ordinary Russian working women actively participated in the Revolution, and many more were affected by the events of that period and the new policies. Beginning in October 1918, Lenin's government liberalized divorce and abortion laws, decriminalized homosexuality (re-criminalized in 1932), permitted cohabitation, and ushered in a host of reforms. However, without
birth control, the new system produced many broken marriages, as well as countless out-of-wedlock children. The epidemic of divorces and extramarital affairs created social hardships when Soviet leaders wanted people to concentrate their efforts on growing the economy. Giving women control over their fertility also led to a precipitous decline in the birth rate, perceived as a threat to their country's military power. By 1936, Stalin reversed most of the liberal laws, ushering in a
pronatalist era that lasted for decades. By 1917, Russia became the first
great power to grant women the right to vote. After heavy casualties in World Wars I and II, women outnumbered men in Russia by a 4:3 ratio; this contributed to the larger role women played in Russian society compared to other great powers at the time.
LGBTQ rights The Soviet Union repressed
homosexuality. Even during the period when homosexuality was officially legal after the abolition of the Tsarist penal code criminalising it, Soviet courts attempted to repress non-traditional forms of sexuality, which were widely viewed by Russian revolutionaries as a form of capitalist decadence despite more liberal views on homosexuality from Soviet academic sexologists. After Stalin's consolidation of power, homosexuality became officially recriminalised in 1934. Homosexuality remained a criminal offence throughout the remainder of the Soviet Union's existence.
Education at a Young Pioneer camp in the Kazakh SSR
Anatoly Lunacharsky became the first
People's Commissar for Education of Soviet Russia. In the beginning, the Soviet authorities placed great emphasis on the
elimination of illiteracy. All left-handed children were forced to write with their right hand in the Soviet school system. Literate people were automatically hired as teachers. For a short period, quality was sacrificed for quantity. By 1940, Stalin could announce that illiteracy had been eliminated. Throughout the 1930s,
social mobility rose sharply, which has been attributed to reforms in education. In the aftermath of World War II, the country's educational system expanded dramatically, which had a tremendous effect. In the 1960s, nearly all children had access to education, the only exception being those living in remote areas.
Nikita Khrushchev tried to make education more accessible, making it clear to children that education was closely linked to the needs of society. Education also became important in giving rise to the
New Man. Citizens directly entering the workforce had the constitutional right to a job and to free
vocational training. The
education system was highly centralized and universally accessible to all citizens, with
affirmative action for applicants from nations associated with
cultural backwardness. However, as part of a general
antisemitic policy, an unofficial
Jewish quota was applied in the leading institutions of higher education by subjecting Jewish applicants to harsher entrance examinations. The Brezhnev era also introduced a rule that required all university applicants to present a reference from the local
Komsomol party secretary. According to statistics from 1986, the number of higher education students per the population of 10,000 was 181 for the USSR, compared to 517 for the US.
Nationalities and ethnic groups The Soviet Union was an ethnically diverse country, with more than 100 distinct ethnic groups. The total population of the country was estimated at 293 million in 1991. According to a 1990 estimate, the majority of the population were
Russians (50.78%), followed by
Ukrainians (15.45%) and
Uzbeks (5.84%). Overall, in 1989 the ethnic demography of the country showed that 69.8% was
East Slavic, 17.5% was
Turkic, 1.6% were
Armenians, 1.6% were
Balts, 1.5% were
Uralic, 1.5% were
Tajik, 1.4% were
Georgian, 1.2% were
Moldovan and 4.1% were of other various ethnic groups. All citizens of the USSR had their own ethnic affiliation. The ethnicity of a person was chosen at the age of sixteen by the child's parents. If the parents did not agree, the child was automatically assigned the ethnicity of the father. Partly due to Soviet policies, some of the smaller minority ethnic groups were considered part of larger ones, such as the
Mingrelians of
Georgia, who were classified with the linguistically related
Georgians. Some ethnic groups voluntarily assimilated, while others were brought in by force. Russians,
Belarusians, and Ukrainians, who were all East Slavic and Orthodox, shared close cultural, ethnic, and religious ties, while other groups did not. With multiple nationalities living in the same territory,
ethnic antagonisms developed over the years. Members of various ethnicities participated in legislative bodies. Organs of power like the Politburo, the Secretariat of the Central Committee etc., were formally ethnically neutral, but in reality, ethnic Russians were overrepresented, although there were also non-Russian leaders in the
Soviet leadership, such as
Joseph Stalin,
Grigory Zinoviev,
Nikolai Podgorny or
Andrei Gromyko. During the Soviet era, a significant number of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians migrated to other Soviet republics, and many of them settled there. According to the last census in 1989, the Russian 'diaspora' in the Soviet republics had reached 25 million. File:Ethnic map USSR 1930.jpg|Ethnographic map of the USSR, 1930 File:European Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Ethnic Groups (Before 1939) - DPLA - 9820cc06b72e7b131366b861f5ee351a.jpg|European Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Ethnic Groups, before 1939 File:Ethnic map USSR 1941.jpg|Ethnographic map of the Soviet Union, 1941 File:U.S. S.R. - Ethnic Compositions - DPLA - 754227d4ec980a6b169104b656de499a.jpg|Ethnic composition of the Soviet Union in 1949 File:Map of the ethnic groups of the Soviet Union.png|Ethnographic map of the Soviet Union, 1970 File:French map of the ethnic groups living in USSR.png|Map of the ethnic groups living in USSR, 1970 File:Ethnic Groups in the Soviet Union - DPLA - d7a6475bd436c74e2b67e621a6b2afad.jpg|Ethnic Groups in the Soviet Union, 1979 File:Comparative Soviet Nationalities by Republic, 1989 - DPLA - 23930ee870e66bd2efa5417463128b28.jpg|Comparative Soviet Nationalities by Republic, 1989
Health In 1917, before the revolution, health conditions were significantly behind those of developed countries. As Lenin later noted, "Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice". The Soviet health care system was conceived by the
People's Commissariat for Health in 1918. Under the
Semashko model, health care was to be controlled by the state and would be provided to its citizens free of charge, a revolutionary concept at the time. Article 42 of the
1977 Soviet Constitution gave all citizens the
right to health protection and free access to any health institutions in the USSR. Before
Leonid Brezhnev became general secretary, the Soviet healthcare system was held in high esteem by many foreign specialists. This changed, however, from Brezhnev's accession and
Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure as leader, during which the health care system was heavily criticized for many basic faults, such as the quality of service and the unevenness in its provision.
Minister of Health Yevgeniy Chazov, during the
19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, while highlighting such successes as having the most doctors and hospitals in the world, recognized the system's areas for improvement and felt that billions of
rubles were squandered. After the revolution, life expectancy for all age groups went up. These improvements continued into the 1960s when statistics indicated that the life expectancy briefly surpassed that of the United States; life expectancy started to decline in the 1970s, possibly because of
alcohol abuse. At the same time, infant mortality began to rise. After 1974, the government stopped publishing statistics on the matter. This trend can be partly explained by the number of pregnancies rising drastically in the Asian part of the country where infant mortality was the highest while declining markedly in the more developed European part of the Soviet Union.
Dentistry \\ According to a 2007
Baltimore Sun article by Erika Niedowski, Soviet dental technology and dental health were considered extremely bad; in 1991, the average 35-year-old had 12 to 14 cavities, fillings or missing teeth. Toothpaste was often not available, and toothbrushes did not conform to standards of modern dentistry.
Language Under Lenin, the government gave small language groups their own writing systems. The development of these writing systems was highly successful, even though some flaws were detected. During the later days of the USSR, countries with the same
multilingual situation implemented similar policies. A serious problem when creating these writing systems was that the languages differed
dialectally greatly from each other. When a language had been given a writing system and appeared in a notable publication, it would attain 'official language' status. There were many minority languages which never received their own writing system; therefore, their speakers were forced to have a
second language. There are examples where the government retreated from this policy, most notably under Stalin where education was discontinued in languages that were not widespread. These languages were then assimilated into another language, mostly Russian. During World War II, some minority languages were banned, and their speakers accused of collaborating with the enemy. As the most widely spoken of the Soviet Union's many languages, Russian
de facto functioned as an official language, as the 'language of interethnic communication' (), but only assumed the
de jure status as the official national language in 1990.
Religion in Moscow during its demolition in 1931 in Leningrad was one of many notable church buildings destroyed during the
Khrushchev Thaw. burning ceremony in the
Uzbek SSR as part of Soviet
Hujum policies
Christianity and
Islam had the highest number of adherents among the religious citizens.
Eastern Christianity predominated among Christians, with Russia's traditional
Russian Orthodox Church being the largest
Christian denomination. About 90% of the Soviet Union's Muslims were
Sunnis, with
Shias being concentrated in the
Azerbaijan SSR. The immediate period following the establishment of the Soviet state included a struggle against the Orthodox Church, which the revolutionaries considered an ally of the former
ruling classes. In Soviet law, the 'freedom to hold religious services' was constitutionally guaranteed, although the ruling Communist Party regarded religion as incompatible with the
Marxist spirit of
scientific materialism. Among further restrictions, those adopted in 1929 included express prohibitions on a range of church activities, including meetings for organized
Bible study. More than 85,000 Orthodox priests were shot in 1937 alone. Only a twelfth of the Russian Orthodox Church's priests were left functioning in their parishes by 1941. In the period between 1927 and 1940, the number of Orthodox Churches in Russia fell from 29,584 to less than 500 (1.7%). The Soviet Union was officially a
secular state, but a 'government-sponsored program of forced conversion to
atheism' was conducted under the doctrine of
state atheism. The government targeted religions based on state interests, and while most organized religions were never outlawed, religious property was confiscated, believers were harassed, and religion was ridiculed while atheism was propagated in schools. In 1925, the government founded the
League of Militant Atheists to intensify the propaganda campaign. Accordingly, although personal expressions of religious faith were not explicitly banned, a strong sense of social stigma was imposed on them by the formal structures and mass media, and it was generally considered unacceptable for members of certain professions (teachers, state bureaucrats, soldiers) to be openly religious. While persecution accelerated following Stalin's rise to power, a revival of Orthodoxy was fostered by the government during World War II and the Soviet authorities sought to control the Russian Orthodox Church rather than liquidate it. During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled. Believers were harassed and persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941, only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence before World War I. Convinced that religious
anti-Sovietism had become a thing of the past, and with the looming threat of war, the Stalin administration began shifting to a more moderate religion policy in the late 1930s. Soviet religious establishments overwhelmingly rallied to support the war effort during World War II. Amid other accommodations to religious faith after the German invasion, churches were reopened.
Radio Moscow began broadcasting a religious hour, and a historic meeting between Stalin and Orthodox Church leader
Patriarch Sergius of Moscow was held in 1943. Stalin had the support of the majority of the religious people in the USSR even through the late 1980s. Under
Nikita Khrushchev, the state leadership clashed with the churches in 1958–1964, a period when
atheism was emphasized in the educational curriculum, and numerous state publications promoted atheistic views. The number of working mosques also declined, falling from 1,500 to 500 within a decade. Official relations between the Orthodox Church and the government again warmed to the point that the Brezhnev government twice honored Orthodox Patriarch
Alexy I with the
Order of the Red Banner of Labour. A poll conducted by Soviet authorities in 1982 recorded 20% of the Soviet population as 'active religious believers.' == Culture ==