By the Numbers – 19 Telling Statistics about Russian Life in 2019

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 25 – Svetlana Saltanova, who summaries research by scholars at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics for the IQ portal, has assembled 19 statistics from the works she has presented over the past year and thereby provided a useful portrait of life in the Russian Federation this year (iq.hse.ru/news/326148307.html).

            They are:

·         23 percent of Russians borrow money or otherwise use credit, a third the percentage of Americans and half that of Europeans

·         68 percent of Russians do not now sort their trash and do not plan to.

·         20 percent of Russians know at least one foreign language, compared to more than 65 percent of Europeans.

·         42 percent of online petitions launched by residents in central Russia achieve their goals; only two percent of those in the Far East and only one percent of those in the North Caucasus do.

·         41 percent of Russians feel that they are not well off.

·         48 percent of Russians live from day to day without any serious plans about the future.

·         68 percent of Russian young people feel themselves happy but only 35.4 percent want their future families to be like the ones they grew up in.

·         14.5 percent of Orthodox believers are guided in their voting by what their priests recommend.

·         6.4 percent of Russian family budgets are spent on relaxation.

·         7 percent of Russian NGOs employ fundraising specialists.

·         The number of medical facilities in Russia has declined by 60 percent over the last decade as a result of Putin’s healthcare “optimization.”

·         Higher educational institutions in Russia with graduate educations have declined in number by 25 percent over the last six years, and the number of graduate students has fallen by 22 percent.

·         60 percent of the instructors at Russian higher educational institutions are women, the highest share in the world. In the US, only 49 percent of instructors are.

·         21 percent of the higher educational institutions of the Russian Federation are in Moscow, and a quarter of all Russian university students are in the two capitals.

·         72 percent of pupils in Moscow aged 11 to 16 experience cyberbullying.

·         57 percent of 14 to 18-year-old Russians view the police as harsh.

·         20 percent of Russian orphans were adopted in 2019, up from two percent in 2005.

·         29 percent of Russian pensioners over 65 live alone. Nine out of ten of these are female.

·         27 percent of Russian smokers acknowledge that they violate the law against smoking in public places.