Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hello, welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service.
I'm Ruth Alexander.
A recent news report, but is it correct?
We'll be taking a look at China's economy later in the programme.
But our first item comes after one of our listeners, Alexandre Deleg, contacted us with a number he'd seen on Twitter.
It's a claim that almost 80% of the males born in the Soviet Union in 1923 did not survive World War II.
We looked online and saw that this is something that's repeated fairly regularly, most notably on the website BuzzFeed, although we haven't been able to track down the original source.
But we asked two academics to have a look into this for us.
The first thing we wanted to know is how many males were born in the Soviet Union in 1923.
Professor Mike Haynes from the University of Wolverhampton in the UK has written a book about the history of death in 20th century Russia.
3.5 million males, there's our number.
Now, one thing to take into account when looking at the claim is that 1923 was a rotten time to be born in the Soviet Union.
Here's Mark Harrison, who's an economics professor at the University of Warwick in the UK.
So even before Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, a significant amount of the boys born in 1923 had already died.
By the time 1941 came, that group of boys were aged 18.
One way of discovering how many of those boys died in the war is to look at the data for military casualties, which was revealed by Soviet historians in the 1980s.
Here's Mike Haynes.
So we've heard the evidence.
Now let's have the answer.
Did almost 80% of the males born in the Soviet Union in 1923 not survive World War II?
Showing 1041–1060 of 4,250 · page 53 of 213
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