Vladimir Putin: The B-Side (PREVIEW)

so this one's titled a long read or yeah sorry A long read on natalism in Russia.

Hello, June and Josh.

I've been a listener for a while, but it was of course your episode on Putin that made me reach out.

Some personal context.

I was born in the late 1990s and grew up in an upper middle-class Moscow family.

The 1990s were hard on us.

My mom often tells the story of how in the early 1990s she brought home a banana.

Fruits were a rarity in grocery stores at that time.

My older sister took it for a bread roll because she has never seen bananas before.

The year after I was born, the central bank devalued the ruble.

My dad still keeps his savings in cash because he doesn't trust banks.

In the early 2000s, we got better financially, same as many Russian families at the time.

As a kid, I traveled abroad and studied English at a private language school in addition to my public school studies, all markers of a fancy lifestyle.

I'm a middle sibling.

Now that I've reached the age that my mom was when she gave birth to me, I'm thinking more about her decision to have kids then.

My older sister was born in the late 1980s, me in the late 90s, and only our young sister in the fat years, the early 2000s.

We've talked about this and about whose economic situation is or was harder, hers in the late USSR and early Russia, or ours now, when two of us are migrants and the third is in Russia with two small children of her own.

We think it's hers.

She thinks it's ours.

Thanks for the episode and your work overall.

I did want to comment on some of the content of the episode.

Government programs supporting families with three plus children have been in place since way before the 2024.

The Russian word for large family is, oh Lord.

All that, all that.

Look at this.