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.
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.