As I may have said, I've been reading the Bible recently. I'm still making my way through Genesis. It occurred to me that all of the passages in which "X begat Y" and "these are the generations of Z" form the basis of traditions in which the enumeration of individuals trumps the drive to aggregate and abstract, something I first started writing about some decades ago: I thought back to this post from April 2005.
But that post referred me back to this post, about which I had forgotten entirely, which speaks of Russians' loathing of Gorbachev, their understanding of Stalin, and their willingness to shed blood in numbers. Which bodes ill in today's environment.
What will the next days and months bring in Ukraine? We don't know. One thing we do know is that Russia's demography is not stellar, though it is far better than it was pre-Putin (I was, frankly, surprised to see when I looked just now that under Putin there have been significant gains in life expectancy and that there's a relatively decent [if still below replacement rate of 2.1 and therefore signaling population decline] fertility rate in Russia -- slightly worse than the US but much better than Japan, South Korea, or Finland). So Russia just can't afford to lose that many people right about now. It has a big land mass to command.
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