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Russia’s population nightmare is going to get even worse
- sam_lowry_ 3y ago"The number of Russians born in April 2022 was no higher than it had been in the months of Hitler’s occupation." Archive link: https://archive.is/NUvxg https://archive.is/NUvxg
- seren 3y agoThat begs the question if the invasion of Ukraine was also partially motivated by adding more Russian speaking people to Russia population.
- Qiu_Zhanxuan 3y agoConsidering the number of people who died and the number of babies that haven't been born due to the conflict, I'd argue that would have been a counter-argument against engaging into this whole mess. The longer this goes on, the dire the prospects are for the Russian speaking world.
- nostrademons 3y agoPeter Zeihan had an interesting take on this, that the Russians moved on Ukraine because their demographic decline means that if they don't invade now, they will forever lose the ability to wage war and hence defend their homeland. The Soviet-era population is rapidly aging out of military service age, and the post-Soviet generation is tiny, and so they will not be able to field a meaningful army if they wait. Basically Ukraine is a last-ditch attempt to save the Russian state. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-r7z0lM5_k&t=42s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-r7z0lM5_k&t=42s Interestingly, he predicted the Ukraine war 5 years before it happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkuhWA9GdCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkuhWA9GdCo
- hardware2win 3y ago>Interestingly, he predicted the Ukraine war 5 years before it happened: But isnt the war ongoing since 2014?
- nostrademons 3y agoIn 2014 Russia annexed Crimea, and the world shrugged. The prediction was more stark, that Russia would attempt to march straight across Ukraine and invade Poland and Moldova. So far that appears to be their intent, though they got hung up in eastern Ukraine (see: Russia's demographic decline being too advanced to field an effective army).
- iamacyborg 3y agoI’m not sure you can call the political and economic response to the annexation of Crimea and the shooting down of a civilian craft a shrug.
- George83728 3y agoIt was basically a shrug; for instance the 2014 invasion wasn't enough to cancel NS-2. Lots of people, Europeans particularly, continued to do business with Russia. In doing so, they were funding the full scale invasion that followed. Only after Feb 2022 did the international community get a bit more serious about sanctioning Russia. Also the shrug at 2014 wasn't unprecedented. The world also shrugged when Russia invaded Georgia 6 years before that in 2008.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoGeorgia is not in the EU or NATO, and has no real impact on anything in the 1st world. To paraphrase a US President "no dog in that fight"
- cmurf 3y ago
- scotty79 3y agoWell, they don't exactly hide that they are stealing Ukrainian children.
- mcv 3y agoThey're stealing Ukrainian children, but there have also been plenty of reports of adults going to "filter camps" where apparently they're selected to be turned into Russians and relocated to live somewhere deep in Russia. Stalin did the same, by the way: he loved to displace populations, especially of conquered or rebellious areas, and replace them with Russians. Crimean Tatars, for example, were moved to Siberia so he could Russify Crimea.
- scotty79 3y agoThe tragic thing was that Putin, instead of attacking Ukraine could have just opened his country for any Ukrainian citizen that feels Russian enough to want to relocate. He could probably get more people, if that's the goal, than with all this bloodshed and pointless destruction.
- mcv 3y agoI'm not sure that many ethnic Russians who tasted life in other countries, really want to live in Russia. It's not a healthy country. Everything I read about life there sounds incredibly depressing.
- scotty79 3y agoThe standard of life in eastern Ukraine wasn't that far off the one in Russia. There were many pro-Russian people there (probably way less now) and given that western Ukraine chose their man and party to run the whole country I can imagine plenty would migrate to Russia given the right push with open laws and some advertisement/propaganda.
- chrysler 3y ago
- forinti 3y agoIt would have been better to offer them land and money to cross over the border and live in Russia.
- George83728 3y agoThey tried that, they are/were giving away tracts of Siberia for free to anybody willing to live on that land, but I doubt there were many takers.
- mszcz 3y agoI wouldn't take it even if they payed me. In a country that does the things it does, even if you could stomach living there, I'm sure if you built something worthwhile there it would certainly be taken from you.
- badpun 3y agoLooks like it, given that Russians army started kidnap Ukrainian children by the thousands from the very beginning of the invasion. These children are then adopted by families deep in Russia, and gradually turned into Russians.
- hnarn 3y agoI don’t really understand what is meant by “the months of Hitler’s occupation” — occupation of what? And what months? Hitler didn’t invade/occupy Russia but the Soviet Union, but that fact notwithstanding, Operation Barbarossa launched in June of 1941 and the Germans weren’t pushed out of Stalingrad until February of 1943.
- epolanski 3y agoThe Soviet Union was still a union of different countries. It can be expected that there was data/census about birthrate in those years during the Nazi invasion.
- sam_lowry_ 3y agoIt was a union on paper. Much less than US is a union of states. Individual republics had a carefully measured dose of national identity in school curricula, local TV and journals. The economy was centrally planned and managed from Moscow.
- badpun 3y ago> The Soviet Union was still a union of different countries. Calling it "a union" may be a bit misleading for people who don't know Russia's history. The countries in USSR were formerly (before the Bolschevik revolution) territories of the Russian Empire, which were conquered by Russia and then mostly held against people's will. The Soviet Republics, created after the Revolution, were artificial creations, as they were completely powerless (all power was coming exclusively from Moscow). They were created to sell the international public opinion on the idea of USSR being the universal "worker's republic", containing many nations, which will soon be joined by Soviet republics of Poland, Germany, France etc.
- epolanski 3y agoIf the legal status of the soviet union wasn't a federal union, it's constituents could've not broke up by the end of the 80s. Legal status matters, even when it is a facade. Another example: even though power was very centralized in Mussolini's hands in Italy, Italy was still a monarchy and the king could depose Mussolini in 1943. Also, the fact that power was very centralized, does not change the fact that countries still operated autonomously and there's no reason to believe censuses would not be counted differently in the different republics.
- lakomen 3y ago[flagged]
- jaza 3y ago"The decline is associated with increased misery". Apparently life in Russia during the Soviet years was jolly in comparison!
- bawolff 3y agoComparitavly it probably was. I can't imagine life is very good there now.
- epolanski 3y agoLife in Warsaw Pact countries was not bad. Nobody lacked a roof or job or something to eat post ww2. Social stability was huge, criminality insanely low, lack of market economy didn't made people obsessed to work themselves to buy useless things one after the other. The situation really got bad by the mid 70s when the gap with western neighbors started increasing and a wind of social and political change hit most of the countries in the pact. But comments like yours make it sound as if people were sleeping in tents or trailers on Moscow's roads.
- ben_w 3y ago> But comments like yours make it sound as if people were sleeping in tents or trailers on Moscow's roads. That's not the type of misery I thinks of when the USSR comes up — the gulags, the secret police, the inability to leave, the propaganda, not the housing. (Also the pre-war disasters like the Holomodor, as while you did exclude that by saying post-war and Warsaw Pact, the preceding comment said "Soviet").
- fixthisplz 3y ago[flagged]
- rsynnott 3y agoEh? The UK's problems are pretty typical of a developed country; aging population. The Russian problem is something else entirely. You'd definitely want to have the UK's population challenges over Russia's.
- phatfish 3y agoYes the UK in the same (if not slightly better) position than most other "developed" countries. However, the green account tells me the the actual intention of the comment is about the "Great Replacement" or other such conspiratorial nonsense.
- dukeyukey 3y agoFor a Western country the UK is actually doing alright - closer in median age to North America than Central Europe, and probably has the strongest migration prospects of non-colonial Western countries.
- alangibson 3y agoThere's a circumstantial argument for Russia partly wanting to take Ukraine in order to bolster the "ethnically Russian" population of the Russian Federation. It's still mostly Russians, but the population pyramids of a lot of the minority groups look much better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Russia
- blackbear_ 3y agoAre you referring to this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Rus...
- alangibson 3y agoNo. Just looking at demographics and making guesses based on them. I'd never take a piece of propoganda like that seriously. It's true that the first people calling themselves Rus were centered around Kiev, but drawing the conclusion "modern-day Ukraine occupies historically Russian lands" is absurd.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoComparing the Kievian Rus to modern Russia is like comparing the Franks (a Germanic people, from Franconia in Germany) to the French. Like, yeah, they may have originated there, but 1000 years later they ain't the same people.
- alangibson 3y agoAgreed. It's a paper thin pretext.
- kypro 3y agoAh yes, if line doesn't up and to the right then it must be bad. For whom is a declining population a nightmare exactly? I understand why from the state's position of wanting to maximising political and economic influence in the world it might be bad to have a lower population relative to other nations, but I think describing this a "nightmare" is a bit extreme. I doubt anyone in Russia really cares that much if the population is declining or growing in any given year. Russia is perhaps in a slightly different situation, but my controversial take here would be that in general the policies which are implemented by governments to increase population almost always come with their own negatives. That's not to say there aren't policies which could work, but I think general when leaders become focused on making population line go up they start making decisions which are bad for the average citizen.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoThere's a couple of topics on HN where there seems to be a very unified Opinion on things. One is that population growth is always good, even though it's cooking the planet alive. Another is that extending life expectancy into centuries-long timespans is also always good, even though again, we're cooking the planet alive. Edit: got a downvote within seconds of writing this comment, which proves my point. Happy World Oceans Day everyone, please ignore the existential fact that we're boiling the oxygen and life right out of them, crippling our weather systems and food chains. The future is bright! :)
- Arie 3y ago> Ah yes, if line doesn't up and to the right then it must be bad. For life expectancy, yes.
- meltedcapacitor 3y agoQuality-adjusted maybe?
- macintux 3y agoAs long as retirement is at least partially funded by taxes, population growth matters a great deal.
- macintux 3y agoPolyMatter tackled the Russian and Ukrainian demographic crisis recently. Ukraine’s situation was terrible even before the war. https://youtu.be/A-1n-05Xu6Y https://youtu.be/A-1n-05Xu6Y
- WinstonSmith84 3y agoIt was an interesting perspective. The part at the end was truly hilarious though "Putin might find some solutions with the help of ChatGPT"
- CrzyLngPwd 3y agohttps://archive.is/NUvxg https://archive.is/NUvxg
- oneTbrain23 3y agoJust take this result with a pinch of salt. The census data is not reliable. Russia, like China arent publishing their data for western to analyse. If you have been to some Russian cities (I have been to Moscow and St P), they are booming there....as in having GDP growth greater than what you are seeing in San Fra for example. This is similar misinformation about Russian fighting with just shovels and dying by hundreds of Ks. The reality isn't matching those literature.