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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29677 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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he population of Russia dipped during WWII by about 10%

I don't have much substantial to add but just wanted to note that I hadn't seen Russian casualties during WWII laid out in percentage terms and I was honestly shocked it is this low. If WWII is somewhat a story of the US's vast industrial capacity and Russia vast population capacity combining together it was fascinating to see it laid out in such stark terms.

The relative loss of human life was actually much higher than that on average. And in Belarus and the Ukraine, for example, even higher (25-33%).

Fair point - it's more just a "man Russia had a ton of people" then a "their sacrifice was not massive" obviously the casualties (both military and civilian) in Russia were insanely large.

Also, the largest proportional wartime loss of adult men in the entire USSR was recorded in Georgia, actually.

Low? If that were in Russia today, it’d be comparable to killing every man between 15 and 30. Spread it out over age and perhaps sex and you’re still looking at years wiped out.

Presumably they were furiously procreating during those years as well! So the decline would have been much more if not for that. And young men were hit much harder as they always are. Nearly 80% of boys born in 1922 wouldn't survive until 1946!

Conflict tends to increase the TFR. But I bet this one will be different. Emigration is such an attractive alternative to staying and fighting/breeding.

I'm actually interested to see how the mirror question of this will affect Russian population. Between white collar flight at the outbreak (see our own «» enthusiast), depending on whose numbers you use casualty rates approaching that 10% of population mark (US estimate 120k, UN population at 144mn) with a similar though not quite as bad population pyramid as the rest of the developed world, how Russia as country of Russians will come out of this win or lose will be interesting and likely different from before.

That's the flipside. But the fact that Russia has been able to hold its own despite huge aid from Western countries ($100 billion? $200 billion?) means that once the Western aid is withdrawn, it's over. Russia has 4x the population and infinite natural resources to sell to China.

It was over when the sanctions failed, IMO. Russia is having no problem selling its oil. We live in a multi-polar world now with China able to defy the US with zero consequences.

(p.s. You are off by two orders of magnitude on the casualty numbers. 0.1% not 10%).

Isn't 120k/144m more like 0.1% than 10%?

Yeah, messed that up using the comma separator as a bad indexing point.

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