The pace of Russia’s economic growth slowed in the second quarter of 2024, official data showed Friday, amid concerns over stubborn inflation and warnings of “overheating.”
Gross domestic product (GDP) dipped from 5.4% in the first quarter to 4% from April to June, the lowest quarterly result since the start of 2023 but still a sign the economy is expanding.
Inflation meanwhile showed no signs of easing, with consumer prices rising 9.13% year-on-year in July — up from 8.59% in June and the highest figure since February 2023, according to data from the Rosstat statistics agency.
Even if Putin dies and gets replaced by someone who immediately stops the war and brings Russia back into a mindset of international trade and cooperation, Russia’s economy will still be fucked for well over a century by the absolute disaster that is its demographics. They were already experiencing very bad “echoes” in their demographics from a entire generations being destroyed by their meat wave tactics of WW2. Now the problem is even worse.
Putin might have completely ruined Russia for centuries.
It’s not just WWII even!
I was talking to someone the other day about Russia’s collective casualties just from ~1913-1945. You have:
So we’re talking, super conservatively, 20-30mill Russians dead if we remove non-Russian Soviet Union casualties. This is in just over 30 years. Most of these will be men which massive influenced their demographics until the 80’s or so. Women used to outnumber men around 2:1 if memory serves.
A lot of napkin math but all of this is to say: in 1910 Russia was over 160mill people. Today, it’s under 145mill.
Their invasion of Ukraine has led to somewhere between 250,000-450,000 Russians dead.
There’s a lot to glean from those numbers.
This country has an obvious but untold tradition of same-sex families: of mom and grandma. A lot of my classmates grew up like that after either a divorce or a death of a father, and remarriage is rare for those who have kids. Besides the country itself is usually compared to a miserable old woman, one of the most typical punchline to national anecdotes is how one argues with wife’s mom, тёща, and a bunch of tabloid papers and toponims are named after her verbally poisonous tongue. I wonder how that affects the mass psyche and contributes to sociopolitical events.
That was not obvious to me and really interesting
I’m glad it was.
I now find that the ‘obviosity’ thing is misplaced. It comes from every time I talk about it with my peers - in a context of anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda. In a recent change of constitution it was established that the traditional russian family is a union of a man and a woman (you could’ve heard rightwing policies with the same wording from other places), and then the government even called 2022 as the Year of the Family, all while demographic problems made women-only family a tradition, women being flatmates a key to survival and men being disposed en masse in one another meatgrinder a daily thing.
And so it goes. Nero fiddled, Putin danced.
I don’t think it’ll be a century.
Look at Czechia, they’re booming after being stuck under the thumb of the Nazis who destroyed most of their non-war industrial output, then the Soviets who destroyed the rest. Since 1992, they’ve put in the hard yards, kick started their economy and industry and fully rejoined the west as a good friend.
It’ll be another ~25 years after they finally decide to join us before they’re back in a good position, but that’s within the lifetimes of the people who could make that choice. They could not only choose, but see the positive outcome of those choices if they started today.
Czechia has massively benefitted from the structural funds of the EU, Russia might not have that option…