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Opposition on the battlefront and worldwide economic sanctions are not the only challenges facing Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. It’s also dealing with a major demographic issue at home.
The defeat in World War I gutted a whole generation of young men, which then was insufficient to repopulate in that generation. The following generation was gutted in World War II.
Khrushchev forced everybody into condos, which reduced the birth rate. Brezhnev presided over a decade of stagnation, which reduced the birth rate. And then, ultimately with the Soviet collapse in 1989, we entered a decade period where the birth rate halved and the death rate doubled. That has generated a massive demographic bomb within the Russian system.
Of course, numbers are just part of the story. Russia’s education system is quite different from the U.S and not doing the country any favors.
In Russia, you go to high school, and after that you get an apprenticeship rather than university training as a rule, and you are an apprentice for five, six years before you then become a skilled craftsman or accountant or whatever it happens to be.
Now, back in the mid 1980s, when the bottom really was falling out of the Russian system, the Russians ceased investing in technical education for everyone. If you were connected to the party you might still be able to get an education, but for most people it just stopped.
It was replaced with ideological indoctrination, which is part of the reason why so many Russians today who are older look at what’s going on in Ukraine and just see it as par for the course. They don’t have an objection to it because they never received kind of the broad spectrum education that you would get in math and economics and engineering and so on.
They were literally raised on the propaganda of the Soviet period. But it also means that the apprenticeship system collapsed, and, overall from roughly 1985 to 1995, the Russian industrial base just stopped. And it’s never really come back.
So what are the implications? The Russian workforce is one of the least skilled in the world. Those who were able to educate themselves or develop skills are fleeing the country. And in the government and military, there’s not an emergent cadre of young leaders ready to step up to the plate.
