The Rediscovery of the Child

Abstract

During the first few years of the post-communist transition, the value of pensions fell, and pension arrears appeared in parts of Russia in the mid-1990s. The legislature focussed much attention on the effort to achieve regular pension indexation, as well as to call for a more transparent pension funding system. Eventually, the executive heeded these calls, and Prime Minister Putin is generally credited with ending the pension arrears crisis in 1999. In 2001, the government proposed a major pension reform which was passed by the Duma.¹ But meanwhile, although politicians were quite interested in the plight of Russian society’s senior citizens, experts warned as early as the mid-1990s that the youngest members of society – children – were in peril. By the mid-1990s, 44 per cent of Russians lived under the poverty line.² Statistics from 1996– 1998 showed that families with children were especially likely to live in poverty and to stay in poverty throughout the period.³ The number of children attending school declined by almost three percentage points between 1990 and 1997.⁴ And yet children received relatively little attention from the Russian legislature until the late 1990s.