The Cold Beginning: The Ripple Effect of the Soviet Birth Practices on Society
“If our society were truly to appreciate the significance of children’s emotional ties throughout the first years of life, it would no longer tolerate children growing up or parents having to struggle in situations which could not possibly nourish healthy growth”. — Stanley Greenspan, child psychiatrist and clinical professor of Psychiatry, Behavioral Science, and Pediatrics.
If your heart was squeezed by a freezing claw on the 24th of February 2022 and you are still searching for answers about how the unthinkable happened — questioning your own responsibility, or simply wanting to better understand what tore apart two fraternal nations — I invite you to look in an unexpected place: the maternity ward.
Let’s do an exercise in empathy.
Imagine you are a newborn. You’ve just gone through an incredibly painful experience, one that brings you closer to death than any other event in the human lifespan. You’ve been ejected from the safety of the womb into an overwhelming world full of aggressive stimuli. Your sensitive brain and body are unfinished; you rely entirely on your caregivers for survival.
Now imagine that immediately after birth, you’re placed on a cold metallic scale with only a cloth between you and the surface, then tightly wrapped and taken away from the warm body of your mother to another vast room where you will stay for several days until discharge. You will only feel her warmth for a few short moments of breastfeeding per day (none at night). The rest of the time — days that feel like eternity to you — you lie on a tray next to other newborns, “so the mothers can rest,” waiting for hours in hunger before you’re fed or changed.
Now let’s ask ourselves a powerful and complex question:
What impact on the collective psyche would a government policy have — introduced in the 1920s and spanning at least two generations — that routinely separated newborns from their mothers immediately after birth, as was the case in the USSR until its collapse in the 1990s?
I think it’s safe to assume this policy had profound, layered, and alienating effects on the collective consciousness, cultural values, and long-term behaviors of society — consequences we are still witnessing today. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to call it a collective trauma. If we want lasting peace (not just a truce), we must become aware of these effects and are invited to joyfully begin the work of repair, aware that we are contributing to a much larger goal of world peace.
Let’s explore some of the possible psychological and sociocultural impacts in more depth:
1. Disruption of Attachment and Bonding
Infant-mother bonding in the first hours and days is foundational and cannot be overstated. Such early separation can interfere with secure attachment, leading to increased anxiety, trust issues, and emotional dysregulation later in life. Early attachment disruptions — which Heidi Priebe educates us on so insightfully — have profound, lasting, and mostly unconscious impacts on our private and professional lives, and thus, on politics. We react instead of acting; our perception of others becomes distorted, and we lack the basic emotional scaffolding needed to build a healthy, peaceful society.
On a collective level, this could contribute to a more anxious, disconnected population — one marked by lower empathy and difficulty forming deep emotional bonds.
2. Weakening of Maternal Identity and Intuition
When a mother is denied the chance to immediately care for and attune to her baby, it may blunt her instinctive caregiving drive, or introduce early guilt, doubt, or emotional disconnection. (The conditions for mothers in Soviet maternity wards are beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say they were nothing short of carceral, promoting learned helplessness.)
Over generations, this may result in a cultural undervaluing of maternal intuition and nurturing — replaced by institutional authority dictating what is “best.” This is one reason we’ve seen some mothers encouraging their sons to enrol in the Russian Defence Forces (in this case effectively “offense,” not “defence”) to fight at the front (see linked Russian documentary).
3. Increased State Control over Family and Individual Identity
Separating infants at birth subtly but powerfully communicates: “The child belongs first to the state, not the parent.”
This erodes the sanctity of the nuclear family and normalizes external authority in private life, reinforcing conformism, obedience, and suppression of dissent — traits useful to authoritarian regimes.
4. Trauma Passed Through Generations
Both mothers and infants may experience this early separation as trauma. If left unprocessed, it can result in intergenerational transmission of insecurity, grief, and emotional blunting.
Whole populations may exhibit lower resilience, elevated baseline stress, and difficulty expressing or processing emotions. (Effectively, a large part of ex-USSR population not undertaking a therapy or personal growth steps currently lives in a state of emotional illiteracy.)
5. Societal Coldness, Emotional Distance or Boundaries issues
Over time, relationships and parenting may skew more toward the functional than the emotional — less warmth, less intimacy — or, conversely, toward enmeshed family dynamics in which personal boundaries are ignored.
Social norms may come to reward stoicism, pragmatism, and endurance over vulnerability, comfort, or emotional expression — traits observed in many post-Soviet cultures.
As for people of goodwill born in the USSR and now relentlessly working toward peace, one key component of this inner work we cannot skip is facing the impact of these birth practices on our families and on our own unconscious.
Our emotional and spiritual healing — born from this awareness — directly contributes to that humanitarian goal. In this way, the wound awakened by this unbearable war may become a catalyst for deeper truth, healing, spiritual growth — and a second birth, the birth of our True Self.
Photo by Alex Hockett on Unsplash
