Russia’s population nightmare is going to get even worse
economist.com
economist.com
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.
Like, yeah, they may have originated there, but 1000 years later they ain't the same people.
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.
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").
I mean, bear in mind that some of that stuff is coming back; note the very high rate of careless opposition politicians and journalists falling out windows, and so on.
[1]: https://www.economist.com/europe/2013/10/19/slave-labour-and...
It also had a certain structure to the misery, which is now replaced by arbitrary brutality both from the state and organized crime.
It is a documented fact that Russian life expectancy dropped immediately after the fall of the USSR. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41294-021-00169-w ; "Male life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by six years between 1991 and 1994, from an already-low 63.4 years to 57.4 years over that period, an almost unprecedented decrease in life expectancy in three years"
They have a chart on which you can see how the recovery corresponds roughly to how successfully post-Soviet states managed to "westernize". Estonia did well. Ukraine has only just recovered to Soviet levels.
In summary: western life expectancy good, Soviet life expectancy adequate, third state of collapse autocracy/anarchy in the middle very bad.
This is always a hard topic to discuss with those not exposed to any life in former Warsaw pact countries. Because there’s a chance they’ll ignore what you say about the day-to-day life of your average person there (and how it was largely ok if often a bit poorer than much of the west), and assume you’re trying to say “communism and everything that came with it was perfect”.
There's probably a whole field of study in what went wrong with the airdropping of "capitalism" and "democracy" into both post-Soviet states and Afghanistan. It clearly missed a number of elements which were required for those plans to work, mostly around trust and rule of law but also around class and small-l liberalism. Somehow these were more easily overcome the closer (geographically) the country was to core Europe. Then there's the semi-democratic not-very-liberal outcomes of Poland and Hungary thirty years on.
Maybe I look like I'm going to bat for the former regimes in these countries but I promise I'm not. It's a really interesting topic and while I can understand if those who lived during this time wouldn't want to relive it, I also wish it wasn't just lazily dismissed using stereotypes by much of the rest of the world (you're not included in that, you seem to have some interest and knowledge on it)
[0] - yes there was KGB/StB/stasi, suppression of opposition and other brutal things. I was in a former secret police prison just this weekend so I’m keenly aware of that.
I used to work with some Russian insurers maany years ago. What they told me is that they believed life expectancy hasn't changed much, but that the Soviet data was massaged to present a better picture.
Later on, the quality of the data dropped, due to general chaos, so insurers swapped to using the massaged Soviet tables - figuring that the magnitude of massaging is comparable to the improvements in life expectancy since fall of USSR.
Those were absolutely non-issues for anyone but a small minority of people.
Movement limitation, which varied in time, is the only thing that applied to a much larger subset of people. It required quite some bureaucracy to travel.
Gonna give you an example: people that were members of the communist party enjoyed an easier time from this point of view. Everyone could join the party by the way, but it was generally unpopular. In Poland I think, e.g., despite the advantages of being a party member, at its peak only few millions were part of it.
Not trying to “whatabout” you here but you could construct a similarly dystopian view of most countries by only focusing on the grimmer parts of life there. In the USA this would involve school shootings, lack of affordable healthcare and housing, poor/forgotten areas, increased threat of violence from the police and the far right. If you focussed on those without any of the most positive aspects (freedom of speech as a constitutional right, good healthcare/education once you break into middle class, realistic possibility of becoming relatively well off, freedom of movement, gender and racial equality on paper) you’d think the country was pretty miserable too.
Again, this is not an attempt at a whataboutist change of subject, rather an invitation to reflect on what you’re saying.
Being unemployed was illegal.
And the 70s are only a decade from when the gulags were closed.
Did you live there? I did.
- Electricity rationed: we had maybe 3-4 days per week and mostly evenings and in winter. We lived in a medium sized city. Plenty of villages had no electricity whatsoever.
- Food rationed: You could buy meat twice a week. Bread? Once ever two days. We were lucky we lived close to nature so collecting mushrooms and fishing filled the gaps.
- Hot water rationed: You can get used to cold showers, I guess.
- Ethnic minorities were viewed as vermin (we were one).
- More and more school subjects were thought not in your mother's tongue.
- Roof? Sure we had.
- Lack of market economy? We had "illegal" movies, "illegal" rock music and some "illegal" western tech. There was a thriving black market economy.
- Your phone was constantly taped and listened on.
- You were afraid who you talked to, were afraid of your friends because they could be informants.
- Criminality low? Maybe in one aspect but corruption was through the roof. You wanted something? Bribe someone.
- There was also a pandemic of alcoholism and violent men towards their wives. My father and 3 of my 5 uncles were part of this statistic. So were thousands of others.
But yeah, life was "not bad".
Like it’s not helpful to pretend that it was a utopia like some “tankies” insist on doing (they’re brain-broken). But it’s equally unhelpful to construct the fantasy that ČSSR was like a real-life Mordor-like state, yet many (not you) insist on doing so.
edit - Downvoted for suggesting we shouldn't just rely on lazy stereotypes. Folks, we love to see it.
You see what I mean, right? Like it's horrific that diseases from antiquity reared their head in a supposedly developed nation. But at the same time, that doesn't exactly tell the story of modern day UK and it'd be very dishonest to suggest that reflects the entirety of the (then) European Union.
In the same way it's horrific that you had childhood trauma that persists to this day. You're under no obligation to defend the circumstances in which you grew up, but I'm sure you're quite aware that your experience was far from universal, as evidenced by comments here.
It's not presumptuous at all to say your experience of lining up for food, feeling scared and having lingering trauma about that is not reflective of the bloc overall. It is certainly an important part of it that should not be minimised (and tbh should be carefully considered so that it isn't repeated). But it is not reflective of every lived experience in the group of countries in question and, again, you know this.
Yes.
- Never had electricity rationed.
- Meat was rationed on a food stamp basis here as well. What should've been the alternative? Only a handful of wealthier people could eat meat? Meat production has always been a problem in eastern Europe and only improved with market economy.
- Never seen hot water rationed
- I don't think racism is a peculiarity of socialist countries. Slavs have always been a culturally xenophobic culture, still are.
- Yes, I'm aware of black market economy.
- Your communications are still constantly taped and listened on unless you're naive to think the opposite.
- Never my family was afraid of who we talked to. Moreover, what was to be afraid of, unless you were plotting something?
- Corruption is still widespread everywhere in the world, not a peculiarity of socialism per se.
- Alcohol-related issues are worse today than they were in soviet times in most of the countries formerly in the warsaw pact.
> But yeah, life was "not bad".
People use to paint those countries as miserable or something, which is straight not true. Most people enjoyed on average the highest standards of living they or their parents ever seen. Cities, infrastructure were built everywhere, women enjoyed the most social progress they'd ever seen, politics, while limited to only communist parties still had seen the most democratization these countries ever experienced.
You are either a Russian troll, someone with an undisclosed agenda, or a naive 13 y/o. The things you're saying are a mix of straight up lies and misdirection and a classic example of historical revisionism that should be called out everywhere we see it.
Concrete points:
- I don't think racism is a peculiarity of socialist countries. Slavs have always been a culturally xenophobic culture, still are.
This is racist bullshit - "slavs" are not inherently xenophobic. 30-40 years of progress just didn't happen in Central Europe because Moscow didn't like big social changes.
- Your communications are still constantly taped and listened on unless you're naive to think the opposite.
Not in the same way, and I have a feeling you know that.
- Never my family was afraid of who we talked to. Moreover, what was to be afraid of, unless you were plotting something?
Being careful about who you talk to about what is literally the thing most people remember right after "we couldn't travel." If you didn't feel this, you were either a small child, politically aligned with the party, or extremely sheltered.
- "You had nothing to fear unless you were plotting something": someone overhearing mild criticism or a politically charged joke was enough to ruin lives, get yourself or relatives kicked out of universities, lose jobs, homes, and so forth. It's impossible to describe living a day after day for decades under that constant anxiety to a person who has always had the freedom to say whatever they want. Even rural potato farmers knew to keep their mouths shut unless they were in a circle of people they trusted.
- "Alcoholism is worse now": oh god no. For starters, it was socially acceptable to drink and be drunk at work, even if you worked with heavy equipment (farms, factories). If you caused an accident, then being drunk was a valid excuse and lessened the punishment.
- "Corruption is widespread everywhere": given the contant shortage of goods, everyone in positions of power always had the attitude of "what's there in it for me?". Everywhere you went to ask for something, be it officials, nurses, dentists or teachers, had the expectation of getting something in return. The whole society ran like a giant "one red paperclip" experiment, with people constantly exchanging bribes and favors and looking for best deals for themselves without any regard for laws and fairness.
Woah, the personal attack because someone has a different opinion and had a different experience than you.
My family never had it bad during communism, still they didn't love it and large parts of my family emigrated to western Europe between the 70s and 80s.
But that doesn't make socialist countries the miserable dystopias you paint, that was just never our experience.
The reason why parts of my family emigrated is simply because life in western Europe was more comfortable and enjoyed more freedom (of movement especially).
If anything it seems that _you_ are the one spewing falsehood.
I suspect part of the reason for the incorrect (in general) things you say is that you seem to be german from your profile, and yes, Eastern Germany was way more controlled and the epicenter of the things you describe. But cross the border to Poland, Yugoslavia or Ukraine and none of the things you describe were anywhere part of the average person's life.
Talk to the millions of Romanians that were incarcerated during the 50s in Communist Camps, thousands died in these Camps. Some were political people from the past, militaries, priests, teachers, students, some were just regular people unwilling to give their land to the state.
Yeah, but there was an entire generation that grew up post-70s. Post-war Europe was just focused on rebuilding, and the centrally planned economies did an OK job, but after Prague Spring things got progressively worse and worse.
You are wrong that people had access to cheap housing and basic goods. While, yes, it was a much better material living standard than third world countries, families with two kids still had to be crammed into tiny one bedroom apartments and considered themselves lucky. Those big grey blocky buildings? You waited 30 years to get an apartment in one of those. You waited 5 years for a car.
It wasn't great. People had enough to eat, and heat in the winter and the streets were safe, but not much more than that. And while you didn't "hussle" to get ahead, you had to do a lot of political maneuvering to get ahead, which probably worked out to be about as stressful.
I think your revisionist view of history is as dangerous as the people responding to you saying the opposite. We should be clear that this way of running a society is thoroughly discredited. Was it the worst place to live? No. Social progress was even made, as you point out. But it was much, much worse than than you seem to imply.
You might argue about what should have happened, but what actually did is enterprising people left for the big cities (leaving the countryside in particular basically lifeless), and the rest went into depression backed by large quantities of alcohol—that is to say, into the ridiculously high male mortality statistics of Russia, Belarus, and others. (It’s more socially acceptable for men to drink, although women are of course not exempted, and while there might be more of them alive they’re also not precisely happy.)
Frankly, many of those factories and communal farms deserved to die on economic grounds, barring drastic changes. But I can’t bring myself to say that the population of the communities built around them (and frequently nothing else for a couple dozen kilometers or more) thereby deserved literal death. That’s what it’s been coming to for the last thirty years, though.
The part at the end was truly hilarious though "Putin might find some solutions with the help of ChatGPT"
Archive link: https://archive.is/NUvxg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-r7z0lM5_k&t=42s
Interestingly, he predicted the Ukraine war 5 years before it happened:
But isnt the war ongoing since 2014?
Also the shrug at 2014 wasn't unprecedented. The world also shrugged when Russia invaded Georgia 6 years before that in 2008.
What does this have to do with the point that the US and EU did in fact essentially shrug at the 2014 invasion of Ukraine? Are you disagreeing with that?
If we make excuses, that aggressive wars of conquest to expand borders and subjugate people is sometimes OK - inevitably leads to "the world does not deserve peace".
It really is throw the baby out with the bathwater, because the document everyone agreed to while bodies were still rotting, says aggression must be stopped so it doesn't spread.
Apparently the past does not effectively speak to the present, that people still think its OK to negotiate with tyranny. Cutting a deal that involves giving up on millions of people just to save your own skin is what damns humanity, and should damn it, straight to hell.
Humans volunteering other humans are scum. It's unconscionable to me the degree of apathy involved. The willingness to try to bribe tyranny with other people's land, lives, their fucking children.
The potentially fatal flaw of the UN charter isn't the obligation of all members to stop any aggression. It was never even slightly imagined that a founding member, and permanent member of the Security Council, would conduct a war of conquest. And so now the Security Council is rendered useless.
Poland has an article 51 right to aid Ukraine in collective defense. They can send ground troops. They can send and launch long range weapons. Moscow is a legitimate military target.
We are here because of every inaction that came before.
[1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n10/edward-luttwak/not-u...
The 1990s were a lost generation for Russia, and then talented young engineers that came of age in the 2000s and 2010s largely went into more lucrative software jobs. Many emigrated to the West; I work with a number of them. The folks who can keep all the old military hardware running (let alone develop new ones) are getting increasingly old, and won't be around much longer.
Poland has been in NATO for a while now; non-starter unless he wanted WW3. And those would be NATO regulars in the mix, not kelptocrats in NATO hand-me-downs.
The resolution and unity displayed by NATO members surprised everybody, even the NATO members themselves
The over simplification of the Ukrainian situation is unreal, it's like we all collectively forgot the last 8-9 years of open civil war.
This guy seems unusual however, probably one of the few used as plausible deniability to prove he doesn't exclusively have right wing conspiracy theorists on, to keep the Spotify money flowing.
I actually bought one of Peter's books and found it quite enlightening at the time, but then found out that some of it didn't quite like up with reality and he seemed unwilling to adjust some of those view points.
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.
In grander scheme, I believe that to be among the among main reasons why Russia invaded Ukraine. Free, prosperous Ukraine would've become an alternative power center in the Russian-speaking world. Imagine if Ukraine had followed Poland post-1991 and had the same median wage nowadays, double the median wage in Russia, with free access to Western markets. That would simply drain Russia from talent, and undermine Putin's legitimacy and the power of all who surround him.
What would've been the reason to live or start a business in Russia if you could move to a country with very similar culture, do the same job, and earn multiples of what your potential in Russia would be capped to? All while enjoying better security in all aspects: economomic safety, personal safety from harm, rule of law, etc.
My mother hosted a Kazakh refugee family for a year. They were from a cossack family (the father) and from a Tatar family (the mother). That day I learn that cossacks were more of a nomad ethnical group from Ukrainian plains than a military unit in Civ :)
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.
It can be expected that there was data/census about birthrate in those years during the Nazi invasion.
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.
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.
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.
You seem to be really straining to split hairs here.
Russia was part of the USSR as the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic [0].
In any case, people in the West commonly referred to the USSR colloquially as simply "Russia." Example: Churchill famously said in October 1939 (just after Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland) that "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest." [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Soviet_Federative_Soci...
[1] https://www.shmoop.com/quotes/riddle-wrapped-mystery-inside-...
I also find it fascinating that I’m downvoted for making a point that I myself concede, and that the rest is simply ignored. My real question was: what “months” are being referred to here?
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.
For life expectancy, yes.
Counter-intuitively, in democratic systems, lot of young people means pensioners become a smaller proportion of the electorate: so the cake is notionally bigger but the slice pensioners can claim might end up proportionally smaller due to weakened bargaining power.
So what exactly happens to people who reach that age and have no other kind of income and can no longer work?
Guess where it moves if `a` is less than 1.
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! :)