The most discussed news topic of the last month in the Russian media was the TikTok trend in which people from all over the world make videos singing a 20 year-old song by Russian singer Katya Lel. Thanks to TikTok, the song reached the top 3 of the Spotify worldwide chart and all the Russian media (including the official newspaper of the Russian Parliament) have reported on it, made features in the national TV news and dedicated talk show specials on state TV to it. The singer herself called the success a "HUGE WIN for the WHOLE COUNTRY!" Finally, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote an insane statement saying that "the cancelling of Russian culture failed", citing the places which the song occupies in various online charts in Western countries. An absolute reflection of Russian society's inferiority complex, when entering a Swedish streaming service's chart and trending on TikTok where people ridicule Russian women, portraying them as stereotypical Russian prostitutes in fur coats and with fake lips and breasts, is celebrating like winning a war. Zakharova's text concludes with "Everyone who is going to cancel us next time will have a taste of our dzhaga-dzhaga." This is a reference to the lyrics of the song, in the chorus of which the singer calls for someone to fuck her and uses the euphemism "dzhaga-dzhaga" for vagina, inviting the person to eat her out.
A telling story of Russian nationalist Andrei "Chibis" Razin, who was a member of neo-Nazi groups in the 90s (when it was legal) and spent the majority of life in prison for petty crimes. Released again in 2022, he decided that he could make money on supporting the war in Ukraine and created a Telegram channel for writing posts about it and publishing photos of him wearing clothes with the logo of PMC Wagner (for which he was attacked several times and doused with pepper spray by passersby). Obviously, it did not prevent him from being persecuted. In early 2023, he was arrested for posting a photo of himself, in which the Centre for Combating Extremism found a tattoo with a neo-Nazi symbol. He was humiliated and forced to declare that he no longer supports right-wing views. Soon after the problems began for the PMC Wagner, online media Izvestia (de facto owned by the state) published a hit piece on him, in which the authors demanded the authorities to pay attention to his activities (the article states that at the time of the publication his channel has received 455 (yes, 455) subscribers on Telegram), and as the evidence of his extremist activity there were screenshots of videos from the events of neo-pagans and random pranks, which "Chibis" found on the Internet and posted on his channel, not even participated in them himself. Even the authors of the article noted that all his activities look fake. However, the funniest thing starts there - the experts on combating extremism interviewed by the authors concluded that the channel was made "for reports to watchmen" and is funded by foreign intelligence agencies. Shortly after the murder of Prigozhin, Andrei "Chibis" Razin was detained on charges of extremism and could face years in prison. His appearance of a clearly drug-addicted marginal served as a source of memes for the political part of the Russian-speaking Internet, mocking Russian nationalists. Fun fact: in the photo from the press release about his detention, the Wagner logo on his clothes was censored.
Attendance at Orthodox churches on Christmas Day in Russia has almost halved over the past 10 years. In 2015, it was reported that 2.6 million believers attended Christmas services across Russia. In 2024, there were 1.4 million of them, according to the Russian Interior Ministry report. That's about 1% of the country's population. Attendance at church services on special occasions such as Christmas or Easter is many times higher than on ordinary Sundays.
The birth rate in Russia has reached the lowest level in the recorded history of the country. Fewer children were born in 2023 than in the worst year in modern history, 1999, which was the peak of the economic and social crisis in the country. It should be kept in mind that a significant share of those born nowadays are children of immigrants, as well as children born in the Muslim regions of the Caucasus, which in the 1990s were less religious, lacked the current level of subsidies from Moscow, and suffered from inter-ethnic and territorial conflicts. The graph shows the number of births in 2023 including Crimea (data not included in the graph until 2014) and Chechnya (due to wars and de facto independence, statistics were not collected from 1993 to 2003).
The graph also shows that there has been no rise in the birth rate under Putin. This is one of the favorite claims of the Western right, that the allegedly successful social policy of Putin's government has led to some baby boom. In reality, the rise in the birth rate in Russia in the 00s and early 10s was due to the fact that a relatively large generation born in the late 70s and early 80s entered the fertile age. The birth rate would have risen anyway.
The graph also shows that there has been no rise in the birth rate under Putin. This is one of the favorite claims of the Western right, that the allegedly successful social policy of Putin's government has led to some baby boom. In reality, the rise in the birth rate in Russia in the 00s and early 10s was due to the fact that a relatively large generation born in the late 70s and early 80s entered the fertile age. The birth rate would have risen anyway.
The overweight rate in Russia is almost the same as in the United States and higher than in any country in the European Union.
The number of single mothers has almost doubled during Putin's reign and is higher than in any country in the European Union. In 2002, the share of children under 18 growing up with one parent was 21%, and according to the latest data it is 38.5% now. Most of them grow up with single mothers, but the number of single fathers has grown four times in the same period. By comparison, in the European Union, the average number of single parent families is 13%. The highest percentage is in Sweden (34%). The number of single-parent families in the United States in 2018 was 23%, but given that the number of single mothers among the African-American population is approaching 80%, and that ethnic minorities in Russia are mostly Muslims, in reality the numbers of single mothers within the ethnic Russian population may be even more shocking. The study was conducted by the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection in 2021 and the war in Ukraine has likely made the situation even worse.
While all of the effective reforms of the post-Soviet Russia were carried out in the 1990s and Putin when he came to power in 1999 only claimed credit for their results multiplied by the sharp rise in oil prices, some reforms are actually Putin's own responsibility. One of the main reforms of his first term was the migration reform, which stated that Russia should accept as many migrants as possible as part of the long-term realization of the "human capital accumulation" project. In Putin's second term, in 2007, a minimum number of 300,000 migrants was added to the project, an influx that Russian officials must ensure every year. Putin himself has publicly called the attraction of migrants a necessary measure to ensure that Russia "does not turn into an empty space." 300,000 migrants is a bar below which it cannot fall, but no limit was envisioned in the plan. Also, these 300,000 migrants must be distributed among the different subjects of the federation, otherwise local bureaucracies will not receive funding. As a result of this reform, we see that while the "dissident right" talk about the horrifying number of migrants in some places like Germany, where the number of immigrants from non-European countries is in the tens of thousands every year, in Putin's Russia the number of new migrants amounted to 1,300,000 in the first three months of 2023.
When discussing migration, it is worth remembering that the typical picture of a European country, when migrants mostly settle in a few largest cities, is not suitable for Russia. For example, hardly anyone outside Russia has ever heard of the Siberian town of Surgut with a population of 400,000, which is not even in the top 50 largest cities in Russia (to the question of how hyper-urbanized Russia is, with all the negative trends that follow from that). Nevertheless, it has a migrant population of 60 thousand. And this is only foreigners with temporary documents, the number of illegal migrants (who entered the country illegally, or after the expiration of their documents did not leave the country), or who have already obtained citizenship, remains unknown. This is the result of the Putin government's consistent policy of replacing the local population that is dying or leaving the country.