Russia plans 'ministry of sex' as Vladimir Putin desperately tries to boost birth rate

A ‘ministry of sex’ could be set up in in the latest move to remedy the country’s drooping birth rate.

Putin-loyalist Nina Ostanina, 68, chairwoman of the Russian parliament’s committee on Family Protection, Paternity, Maternity and Childhood, is scrutinising a petition demanding such a move. This comes as ’s officials are coming up with myriad ideas to meet his demand to halt the demographic slide made worse by the hundreds of thousands killed in the war in he unleashed almost three years ago.

One bizarre proposal is to turn off the Internet - and even the lights - between 10pm and 2am to encourage couples to have sex. Another idea is for the state to pay stay-at-home women raising children for doing housework, and to include this in their pension calculations. One more notion is that the state should pay for first dates - up to the value of 5,000 roubles [£40].

Yet another proposal is that public cash should fund wedding nights in hotels for couples up to a value of 26,300 roubles [£208] in the hope this stimulates pregnancies. The ministry of sex plan to take charge of initiatives to boost the birthrate was raised in a petition organised by GlavPR agency, according to Moskvich magazine.

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It is not immediately clear who is behind the scheme. Many regions are producing their own plans to encourage couples to have children. Female students in Khabarovsk region aged 18 to 23 are to be paid £900 on the birth of a child under a new initiative.

Chelyabinsk is more generous, paying students £8,500 for the birth of their first child. A regional health minister Dr Yevgeny Shestopalov demanded that Russians create babies during coffee and lunch breaks in offices and factories in a sex-at-work scheme. “You can engage in procreation during breaks, because life flies by too quickly,” he urged.

But in Moscow region the state is intruding into women’s sex lives in an attempt to force them to have more babies. Intimate questionnaires about sex and menstruation have been sent to female public sector workers, in a blueprint for a nationwide interrogation of women.

Those refusing to answer are ordered to attend doctors’ appointments where they are asked the same invasive questions. Among dozens of personal questions - which are not anonymised - are these:

• At what age did you start having sex?
• Do you use a condom during sexual intercourse?
• Do you use hormonal contraception (eg birth control pills)?
• Do you have pain during intercourse?
• Do you have any bleeding from your sexual life?
• Do you suffer from infertility ( does not occur with regular intercourse)?
• Have you ever been pregnant? If yes, how many times (indicate the quantity as a number)?
• Have you ever given birth? If yes, how many times?
• Do you have any sexual diseases?
• Have you had surgery for gynaecological diseases?
• At what age did you start menstruating?
• How many days on average does menstruation last?
• Is your menstruation painful? (do you use painkillers?)
• How many children do you have?
• How many children would you like to have (taking into account the ones you have)?
• Are you planning a pregnancy, including within the next year?

Women from state-run cultural institutions in Moscow region were “indignant” over being ordered to provide this data to HR departments. One victim told Caution News outlet: “We submitted blank [questionnaires], and they told us to write in our full name. So we wrote [names], but did not fill out the questionnaires.”

Now they were being called to interviews with state doctors “and answer the same questions”. Separately, in Moscow women have been offered free fertility tests - and so far 20,000 are complete.

Already deputy mayor Anastasia Rakova, a Putin fanatic, has told women the results show they must rush to have babies as soon as possible - in line with Kremlin policies. “Everyone in the city knows that there is a special test which allows us to establish the fertility level of a woman, her ability to get pregnant,” said Rakova.

“The first results based on the [initial] 20,000 batch suggests that, unfortunately, quite a significant number of women of different ages need to abandon all things important to them now - and get on with the main goal, the main goal of any woman, to [get pregnant and] become a mother.”

The Kremlin refuses to believe that misery inflicted by Putin’s war - which has seen 600,000-plus men killed or maimed - and resulting damage to family life and the standard of living is behind a reluctance to start families or have additional children. On top of this, more than one million mainly younger Russians have emigrated to escape the war.

The sex initiatives are 38 years after a legendary moment on a 1986 television show linking Soviet and American women when Russian participant Lyudmila Ivanova said: “We have no sex, and we are strictly opposed to it.” She was trying to explain that in the USSR there were no TV commercials using sex to sell products. But her words were used afterwards as highlighting that there was “no sex in the Soviet Union”.