Marriage and Fertility in Russia of Women Born between 1900 and 1960: A Cohort Analysis

In this paper we present a demographic analysisof the marital and fertility careers of Russianwomen, born between 1900 and 1960 and based onindividual retrospective life histories,collected in the most recent (five percent)microcensus of the Russian Federation from1994. It extends an earlier analysis of womenborn between 1910 and 1935. Although politicalevents often had profound effects on themarital life course, none of the observedcrises in Russia has succeeded in exerting adecisive influence on the fertility transition.The fertility decline started late, but takinginto account infant and child mortality thatcontinued to be very high until the fifties,all generations born since 1920 had a completedfertility near or below replacementlevel.