Not many old men in Russia
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/11/russia
Average russian male is dead by 59. By 2008 thousands of ‘ghost villages’ contain’d fewer than 10 people, mostly old women.
Fifty years ago, the village of Slyozi in western Russia was a bustling place full of men, women, children, cows and pigs. Just down the road was a busy collective farm. People kept bees and looked after chickens. In the late 1950s, it got its first combine harvester.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of communism, Slyozi has been transformed - from a thriving agricultural community into a village of ghosts. After the second world war, and the departure of the invading Germans, it had a population of around 100. These days, the population is four women. There is Olga Feyodorovna, an 83-year-old widow who walks with a limp and has an over-excitable dog, Verney. She lives in a crumbling dacha alongside the main road. Olga is a bit deaf. Her husband, Boris, died in 2004.
Russia. It is what it is!
