One of the nicest sites on the Internet for data freaks is Max Roser’s Our World in Data, which produces lavishly illustrated graphs on a wide variety of political, economics, and society-related topics.
The links to the original data sources are also very useful.
I found something similar (if much smaller scale) for Russia at Our Country in Data. The authors also have a series of Russia maps showing different statistics across time here.
Here are some of the most interesting finds, let me know if you discover anything interesting:
- Demographics: Russia’s (Second) Demographic Transition
Average age of mother at birth of first child (red).
- Living Standards: Interactive Graph of Salaries by Region/Sector
-
Geography: Map of All Russian Cities
- Geography: Map of Russia by Train Travel Time
- Politics: History of Putin’s Approval Ratings
VCIOM polls are red, Levada polls are blue, FOM polls are yellow. Note that the link also has an interactive version, with further links to raw data; I hadn’t found a VCIOM series going back to 2006 until now!
(Note that I have my own version).
- Economics: Living Standards 2012-18
Measure of living standards across each of Russia’s regions in the past 6 years.
- Economics: Structure of National Projects Financing
I wrote about the 13 national projects, budgeted at 25 trillion rubles (~= $400 billion), for 2019-24 here. Here we have all that data, but in graphical format.
Infrastructure – orange; roads – Red; ecology – lilac; green – demographics; blue – healthcare; digital technologies – turquoise; housing – yellow; exports – brown; education – magenta; science – cyan; entrepreneurship – light green; culture – purple; labor productivity – pink.
- Economics: Russian Budget
Income as %GDP – red; Spending as %GDP – blue.
Even I hadn’t realized the fiscal tightening was that severe – absolute spending (as per the second graph in the link) even in 2018 was lower than the absolute peak attained in 2013.
Coupled with monetary tightening, no wonder the Russian economy has underperformed since 2014.
There’s also a nice direct comparison of Moscow vs. Saint-Petersburg, amongst other things.
Note that swapping of places around the time of the Civil War.
- Demographics: Time that Russia Is All Emigrating to Moscow
That’s happening, but in reality, what’s happening is that Russians are emigrating to bigger regional cities in general, while the countryside continues to empty out (this is a global phenomenon).
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
I notice that Russian data sites are still retarded and are not adapted for international use. Another sign of Russian stagnation/backwardness? Rosstat’s English/international site has been a hot mess for a long time, as well, so it seems to be a common disease. I wrote this to them a few days ago:
Got this in response:
https://i.imgur.com/JLsGqHX.jpg
It a scanned document, sent in pdf form, which I found weird and somewhat anachronistic (who does that in modern bureaucracies anymore?). Nevertheless, it seems Rosstat is finally getting its shit together. Maybe that can inspire those guys as well.
As someone who can’t read Russian, this blog post is more annoying than useful.
Also, it’s “a series of Russian maps”, not “Russia maps”. Save the Pidgin English for when they thaw your cryogenically frozen brain in the 25th century.
Sad!
I’ve had years of cramped-up city life
Trapped like a duck in a pen
All I know is it’s a pity life
Can’t be simple again
But it can be simple again.
Considering your amusingly demanding tone, I find it downright funny that they responded to you in a nice manner.
Here in the states, unless you were a VIP, they’d just send you a blank bulk response.
Some thoughts:
1) From the map of all Russian cities, you can see that Northern Siberia is almost empty of people, but I already knew that
2) Cheeky for the city ranking to include Baku and Tbilisi among Russia’s cities between 1918 and 1921
3) In 1991, right before the end of the Soviet Union, five of its ten top ten cities were outside Russia’s current borders: Kiev, Kharkov, Tashkent, Minsk and Baku
4) Not much change in city rankings between 1991 and today
What made Riga much more attractive to settle in in the Tsarist era than cities such as Tallinn (then Reval), Vilnius, and Kaunaus (then Kovno) were?
One map I found interesting was the one showing population growth between 1926-2019 in the article about internal migration in Russia, it really shows how demographically devastated the regions around Moscow were by the 1930’s and 1940’s as well as the impact of Moscow pulling in people from the surrounding areas.
And almost 30 years later all five of them are still located outside of Russia’s borders and still outside of Russia’s control. Russia aimed to get Kiev, Kharkiv, and Minsk back into its orbit over the last decade but failed in regards to all of these–at least so far.
Minsk, Tashkent and Baku remain in Russian orbit. Kiev exited it in 2014. “Russian orbit” is simply a collection of ex-Soviet territories, who are on friendly terms with the Kremlin.
BTW, Moscow’s official population grew by 50% since the fall of communism. Actual population probably doubled.
They see a western name and instinctively sense their inferiority.
Strange, my experiences of Swedish bureaucracy is much better. Americans are typically stereotyped as warm (to the point of it being false) whereas outsiders often claim we’re cold and introverted. I’ve always maintained that we are in fact very helpful people, but we’re just hard to get to know and dislike empty gestures and cold talk, which often gets misinterpreted as misanthropy among ‘warmer’ cultures.
Any stats on immigration and the growth of people from the stans and caucuses?
I think you could use either – “Russian maps” could mean maps made in Russia, whereas “Russia maps” can only really mean maps OF Russia. Translated keys would be nice though.
Anatoly – “Russians are emigrating to bigger regional cities in general, while the countryside continues to empty out (this is a global phenomenon)“
Not really in the UK. Immigrants are filling the cities, while Native Brits are emptying out to the country. Rural towns everywhere in England and Wales are seeing new house building, mostly on fertile agricultural land. It’s not as if we need food…
The English countryside is becoming suburbanised as more and more people move there. Forty years ago, before the minority population had really grown, the most desireable houses were suburbs close to the cities, and country property was cheap. Not so now. Close to the cities means having electric gates and cameras.
But then England is the most densely populated major country in Europe (I think Luxembourg and Monaco might beat it, but Holland and Belgium don’t). A great chunk of the ‘British’ landmass is mountain or bleak moor (Wales and especially Scotland).
https://b.radikal.ru/b34/2001/e2/ee2ced4c07f9.png
https://a.radikal.ru/a21/2001/87/9c0f9a5c7e76.png
Very typical of Russia. They will answer you, seriously and politely, with the eternal excuse that such and such is under construction — and, probably because it’s an official thing, be required to print out, sign, copy, and have notarized three times, an official response. Russians are huge wasters of paper. Never seen anything like it.
English sections of websites, where they exist, are spotty at best. I’m always surprised that RZD actually works.
All of those are still in Russia’s orbit with the exception of Kiev and Kharkov
And Kievs departure from Russia’s orbit has been the biggest demographic and economic disaster for the Ukraine in it’s history
True, although I think the British tendency to want to live in the countryside is quite unusual globally speaking. Rural living in most other countries is associated with peasantry and therefore considered undesirable.
I think Britain to a certain extent is demographically unusual in that the native poor, immigrants, etc here are likely to live in big council estates and tower blocks in the towns and cities, and the wealthier natives tend to live in semi-rural and rural areas.
What does “Russians Xstan” imply? Is this a racial Slavic grouping or is this central Asians (racially Asian) with dual passports?
This is a racial Slavic grouping
For the wealthy, the ideal is the “flat in town” (London) and somewhere in the country or a country town. The Cotswolds is the favourite area.
The working middle classes used to favour the London suburbs, but mass immigration has destroyed that to a great extent. Places like Croydon, Bexley Heath and Ealing (formerly ‘Queen Of The Suburbs’) are no longer places of neat lawns and lace curtains, for raising an English family.
Croydon was a war zone during the 2011 riots, and an English pensioner was killed in Ealing for trying to put out a fire black youths had started.
https://londonist.com/2011/08/man-dies-following-attack-in-ealing-riots
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/9209179/Darrell-Desuze-jailed-for-eight-years-over-London-riots-killing.html
His killer’s been out for four years.
It seems to me that the desire to live not in the city but in nature (but not as a peasant of course) is the most natural thing for a person. At least in Russia, this is a common ideal – buy house in the vicinity of the city where there is a forest / beach for swimming/garden around the house, and live in this house either all year or in the warm season.
Love of the countryside is mostly a European thing, I think. In other parts of the world, like Asia and Africa, where in the wild you will have a lot of venomous critters that will kill you, someone moving voluntarily from a town to the countryside will be seen as crazy.
So much open space in the North.
I feel like Russia should be building underground cities to work out the kinks for when we do it on other planets. Or else genetically modifying people into Yeti-hybrids, so that they can walk outside in the cold without excursion suits.
2014-2015 was not worse than the early 1930s, World War 2, etc. lol. In recent history it certainly wasn’t worse than the 90s.
Surely it’s “maps of Russia.” To my ears, the adjective-noun construction strongly suggests country of origin rather than country of depiction.
Let’s try it with Japan:
map of Japan (map depicting Japan)
Japanese map (map from Japan)
Japan map (ambiguous, but grammatically sound*)
Interestingly, the noun-noun construction sounds more natural with cities — especially cities with adjectival forms.
map of Moscow (map depicting Moscow)
Muscovite map (map from Moscow)
Moscow map (ambiguous)
With Stockholm, which doesn’t have an adjectival form**, we get this:
map of Stockholm (map depicting Stockholm)
Stockholm map (map from or depicting Stockholm)
Which makes the noun-noun construction even more ambiguous.
** Wikipedia suggests the adjective Stockholmer, but I have never once heard that word (except as a demonym, obviously).
Speaking of maps of Russia, Sasha Trubetskoy has some nice ones on his website.
https://sashat.me/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/ru_life_both.png
https://sashat.me/2018/03/27/life-expectancy-in-russia/
https://sashat.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/rus_hdi_en.svg
https://sashat.me/2017/04/23/development-in-russia/
I also like the one of murder rates across the regions over time (interactive, so you have to click the link to see it):
https://sashat.me/2018/09/03/russias-murder-rate-a-quiet-miracle/
Haha. You sound more and more like Thorfinsson with every passing day.
I think the British value it even more than most Europeans to be honest. British people have traditionally been among the biggest buyers of dilapidated rural chateaus in France because they offer the opportunity to have a big rural property so cheap, vastly cheaper than a similar property would cost in the UK.
These sorts of rural properties are cheap because the French are generally speaking not interested in them, British people place a lot more value on these sorts of rural properties than the French do.
Not quite on topic but also not that far off.
The whereabouts of Putin’s “stolen billions” is finally revealed.
“How has Krasnoyarsk changed in the last 20 years”
Probably, there are similar projects done for other Russian cities, as well.
Classic Karlin.
The UK is different to much of the rest of Europe in that the Town and Country planning act 1947 essentially put a collar around the growth of cities in the form of virtually immutable green belts and green field sites which could not be developed…forcing developers to build beyond the greenbelts (city fringes) and instead the 20 or so miles beyond the belt in small villages.
Its always a contrast to me that just 30 or so miles outside wealthy west German cities, you can find relatively cheap property in villages that essentially havent enlarged since the 1950s. This despite better and cheaper transport than comparable places in England. Virtually no villages in England that are commutable to any reasonably sized town are undisturbed since the 1950s, all have a housing estate or two tacked on in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s etc.
There was also an encouragement for the cities to not grow with the overspill programs, where entire ‘slum’ areas of the biggest cities would be emptied and razed. Their residents rehoused in either smaller ‘new towns’ or ‘expanded towns’ well outside the large cities.
There was also, due to the follies of the 60s and fondness of traditional architecture, a general dislike of high rise buildings until really the 21st century….Canary Wharf only going ahead due to its isolation from the rest of London, so density didnt start increasing until recently.
But such has been the level of immigration to England in the last 20 years, the Greenbelt is finally being built on, and even small towns like Woking are getting proposals for 35 floor tower blocks. I suspect over the next 20 years, UK cities will become as dense as German ones, albeit with a far browner, less European population.
There’s something especially personal about receiving a letter with a real signature. I’m seriously thinking of emailing random requests to various Russian agencies just to get a pdf reply.
Always amazing that I have to come to unz to find anothe englishman speaking sense (outside of the hardcore pals for life thst I have bludgeoned into accepting my realtalk).
Funny you talk about emptying of the cities and now even suburbs into the surrounding countryside, as I type this on my way back from a night out in east London (with some wealthy hipster type friends who live there, back to my apartment in a semi-rural commuter village. I lived in London until 2 years ago, at which point I married and was faced with 2 prospects:
1) using our combined savings to buy a 1-room flat in zone 1 above a takeaway
2) buy a 3-bed house in zone 5-6 and my kids grow up in a world where it is normal for Europeans to be rare and exotic
3) move outside of London to preserve my sanity (still living in a 2-bed flat though, because i bought in a place so white you wouldn’t believe it)
I was driving through Uxbridge earlier today. It’s a shame, the housing stock is decent and up until even 20-25 years ago it would have been 90% European or British. Now it’s just another breeding ground for aspiring middle-class Indian software developers and the usual hijabis who are afforded an existence thanks to clannish money-pooling and government bennies
Japan map (ambiguous, but grammatically sound*)
“Japan map” sounds like pidgin or to parler petit nègre, as the French call it. If people want to sound like their “English no so good” then rock on. That goes for people who know no language other than English.
There’s hoping Russia will win over Belarus in the end.
Unlike what is reported in the West, it won’t ‘swallow’ the country, i.e. it won’t be a full merge, and Belarus will likely keep its elites and a great degree of local autonomy, while also allowing Lukashenko to influence Russian policy.
The advantage if this happens is that no Maidan will be possible in Minsk because Russia will not allow it, since a closer union will most certainly include military bases and the harmonization of the police forces. Russian intel and new power in Belarus will also allow it to identify and remove traitors.
This is the optimistic outlook, and the US is aware.
Remember the recent leaked list of countries that were to be added to the US travel ban? Belarus was included. Well, it turns out it didn’t make it to the end because of “foreign policy considerations”, i.e. the US is committed to funding compradors in Belarus and preparing it for a future Maidan, so it has to play nice:
The fat Zionist shill Pompeo will be in Minsk in February to spread the message that the US stands with Belarusians against Russian aggression.
My predictions: while Lukashenko is alive, Belarus will not face a Maidan (he would resort to Russian help if that were to happen), and it may or may not integrate with Russia, a step in the direction of restoring Rus’, but after Lukashenko’s out, and if there’s no integration by then (as I said, it can go either way), you can rest assured that there will be several traitors ready for a putsch.
Thorfinsson once called him “Thulean Fraud,” but maybe that was just the same person using different handles and ham-fistedly trying to make it look otherwise. I’ve seen that happen on other forums before.
We need some kind of NKVD investigation to determine the truth. I accuse both the Thulean and Thorfinsson of being wreckers.
You and your pals buy me one of those fancy English pints if I ever come to England. If I get drunk, I’ll sing Hank Williams all night and give you a real American abroad experience (not some faggy white shitlib America, but the real open plains, steak and potatoes America).
Indo-European*
That’s cuz Brits are pasty pajeets||
Potatoes make you homosexual
Steak makes you a jew
Sounds about right
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/604856403332562955/673080704904593417/Z.png