According to whom? Western “Russian Experts” with liberal arts degrees who can’t even speak Russian and have spent little to no time in that country? Not to mention have been wrong about nearly everything on both the economic and military fronts?

If there’s any take-away from current events, it’s how wrong so many “experts” have been on this topic. The easiest way to tell is by looking up the credentials of these journalists and other “experts”.

Matt Taibi, who speaks Russian and lived there for many years has a lot to say about it. I also work with and talk to Russians living in Russia, we’ll they’ve mostly left the country but I’m not sure that matters in this context.

It’s also straightforward to just look at data the Russian government publishes. Unemployment is chronically high, economic mobility is declining, life expectancy is declining, the economy is too reliant on oil, corruption is rampant. What isn’t a mess?

See, you’re just repeating western memes about Russia. This is exactly the problem that I keep bringing up. Not only are you wrong, you’re way off.

Russia not only has a consistently low unemployment rate, they are one of the top countries for migrants workers. In fact, there’s a chronic labor shortage there which is actually a problem for the war effort.

And both life expectancy and the population rate have stabilized if not reversed due to well thought out efforts at the federal level (ignoring the current wartime situation).

I hate to break it to you but it’s no longer 1998 in Russia. Sources:

- https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/unemployment-rate

- https://citizenpath.com/countries-with-the-most-immigrants/

- https://youtu.be/oK5kLBlphsI (if you don’t speak Russian, turn on auto translate)

- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-017-9451-3

- https://archive.ph/th2tK

And one just for fun:

- https://youtu.be/L0WzkkFrox4

- https://youtu.be/l7fBhPOQ5PE

A random video using street view time lapse to show how much things have improved over the past decade. There’s many like this. And compare these to scenes in America.

I'm not trying to say Russia hasn't improved in the last 20 years, it clearly has but there are obvious structural problems. There are fair criticisms of every government, my own especially, there's no need to deny it.

Yeah, great unemployment is below 6% for the first time since 1992 in the last year. Youth unemployment is still nearly 17% which is comparable to France but still awful.

The immigration numbers, and I'm sure you know this, represent a lot of ethnic Russians in neighboring former soviet satellites moving to Russia so I'm not sure it's particularly impressive as a stat by itself and he Russian government is encouraging it because it has a birth rate of 10.7 which is quite low.

Your article on mortality cuts off at 2014 and the rate has shot up to 16.7 again, and life expectancy lags behind Serbia and Bulgaria.

An all of this still ignores the fact that the Russian economy is utterly dependent on oil exports, accounting for 21% of GDP before the sanctions.

Moreover Russia ranks 137 out of 180 countries on the Corruption Perceptions Index by Transparency International.