Quote (ofthevoid @ Jan 10 2024 09:41pm)
It's really not, they are in war production, churning out more war gear than the collective west is willing to match in Ukraine. They aren't royally fucked, they lost 30 million people in WW2 with large swaths of the country completely destroyed, and recovered within a generation, what exactly is so much more severe today that will royally fuck them in the long term?
Russia wasn't industrialized to the degree other countries were so they weren't fully utilizing their entire work force the way they are today. This meant as they continued industrial expansion they had plenty of workers. There is no industrial expansion today and even if there was they have no workers for it.
They also had a much healthier population pyramid with a fertility rate near 3 and an average age of 25. Right now the average age is over 40 and the fertility rate is less than 2. The older people are less productive and quickly become a drain on the system as they retire, which will more than offset the new births productivity.
Quote (Black XistenZ @ Jan 10 2024 09:53pm)
Back during the 1940s, Russia still had rapid population growth, birth rates were significantly above 2.1 children per women. And the country actually never truly recovered from the demographic bleeding it suffered during WW2.
Without the death toll from the war and considering the growth rates at the time, chances are that the USSR's population would have been some 100-150 million higher in 1989. Since Russia has always been an underpopulated country, and since the countries of the Warsaw Pact still had a dangerous numerical advantage* over those of NATO during the 50s and 60s, this additional manpower could have changed the course of the entire Cold War.
*keep in mind that the USSR's population in 1962, during the Cuba crisis, stood north of 220m while the US population was at only 184m. This is also not a contradiction to them being underpopulated since the Soviet Union/the Warsaw Pact were that fucking huge by surface area.
Russia's demographics after WW2 were a lot more favorable than I thought they were. The only real issue was excess women over men, but the average age and fertility rate were much better than I expected when I looked at the specific numbers.
This post was edited by Thor123422 on Jan 10 2024 10:09pm