Jun 12, 2025 10:10 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 12, 2025 10:20 PM by C C.)
PETER ZEIHAN (geopolitics)
https://youtu.be/S6mXqOk63Ss
VIDEO EXCERPTS: The demographic situation in Russia is bad and has been declining for the better part of a century. [...During the Soviet era...] people were forced into small apartments, sometimes at most one room, which really dissuaded them from having more kids.
[...] Now, the second big issue is drugs and, alcoholism. ... vodka is still a day-to-day plague. Beer is considered not an alcohol. You can actually get it in a lot of vending machines on your way to work if you want to, but hard drugs were the real problem. [...] we had at one point something like 10 million heroin addicts in post-Soviet Russia, a country with [then] under 150 million people, very, very bad for demographics, kept the death rate high, kept the birth rate low.
[...] And then third ... you have significant economic degradation [...] we had long periods of stagnation under Brezhnev, and then we had the post-Soviet collapse and now the Ukraine economic contraction, all of which have convinced people that tomorrow is going to be worse economically for them than today. And that is arguably the single worst thing for convincing people to have kids.
If you don’t think there’s going to be a world for them to live in, you usually don’t want to have them. And so Russia traditionally has the world’s largest and highest abortion rate as well, with some statistics suggesting as many as 70% of all pregnancies are terminated.
On top of that, most recently, we have the Ukraine war.
When the Russians started mobilizing, a million men aged 30 and under fled the country. And since the war began three years ago, a million men, mostly aged 30 and under, have either been killed or incapacitated to the point that they’re functionally non-workers within the Russian system. So this is bad. It’s only going to get worse...
[...] the clearest sign that the Russians are facing a real pressure in the demographics is going to be what happens with the Ukraine war, because if they simply run out of men who are under 30, who can fight that, it’s going to be very, very visible. But we’re not there yet...
The demographic crisis in Russia ... https://youtu.be/S6mXqOk63Ss
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/S6mXqOk63Ss
https://youtu.be/S6mXqOk63Ss
VIDEO EXCERPTS: The demographic situation in Russia is bad and has been declining for the better part of a century. [...During the Soviet era...] people were forced into small apartments, sometimes at most one room, which really dissuaded them from having more kids.
[...] Now, the second big issue is drugs and, alcoholism. ... vodka is still a day-to-day plague. Beer is considered not an alcohol. You can actually get it in a lot of vending machines on your way to work if you want to, but hard drugs were the real problem. [...] we had at one point something like 10 million heroin addicts in post-Soviet Russia, a country with [then] under 150 million people, very, very bad for demographics, kept the death rate high, kept the birth rate low.
[...] And then third ... you have significant economic degradation [...] we had long periods of stagnation under Brezhnev, and then we had the post-Soviet collapse and now the Ukraine economic contraction, all of which have convinced people that tomorrow is going to be worse economically for them than today. And that is arguably the single worst thing for convincing people to have kids.
If you don’t think there’s going to be a world for them to live in, you usually don’t want to have them. And so Russia traditionally has the world’s largest and highest abortion rate as well, with some statistics suggesting as many as 70% of all pregnancies are terminated.
On top of that, most recently, we have the Ukraine war.
When the Russians started mobilizing, a million men aged 30 and under fled the country. And since the war began three years ago, a million men, mostly aged 30 and under, have either been killed or incapacitated to the point that they’re functionally non-workers within the Russian system. So this is bad. It’s only going to get worse...
[...] the clearest sign that the Russians are facing a real pressure in the demographics is going to be what happens with the Ukraine war, because if they simply run out of men who are under 30, who can fight that, it’s going to be very, very visible. But we’re not there yet...
The demographic crisis in Russia ... https://youtu.be/S6mXqOk63Ss