Always entertaining and educating blog Strange Maps writes about "Stalin's Siberian Zion" – the Jewish Autonomous Region in Siberia. To make things more interesting I have collected the results of population censuses:
|Year:||Total population of JAR:||Jewish population of JAR:||Total population of Russia (thousands):||Jewish population of Russia: (thousands)|
So, nowadays the percentage of Jewish population in Jewish autonomous region is about the same as across Russia
The figure below represents the decrease of the population of some ethnic minorities in Russia. Orange line is Jews, green line is Germans and blue line is Ukrainians (1989 is 100%).
I just have to add that the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia questioned these results. They say that the Jewish population in Russia is at least six times larger. The specialists from the Jerusalem university, though, replied that the number of Jews in Russia may be about twice as large as the result of the census (that is, about 500,000), but hardly much more.
God Plays Dice is a blog about mathematics. Yesterday, the author posted a link to an article in Journal of Mathematical Behavior, written by Andrei Toom: A Russian Teacher in America (PDF). Mr. Toom makes some statements about the attitude of American students and compares it with the attitudes of the students he taught in the USSR. He admits that he has "very little experience with the bulk of the Russian population", since most of his students in Moscow "were children of intellectuals, because in Russia a much smaller percentage of youngsters than in US go into higher education".
I have no figures at hand, but according to this article, "Russia also had one of the highest shares of population with tertiary education (over 50 percent)". Does anyone know the exact figures for Russia and USA?
PS: the difference is that in the USA the salary of the people with higher education grows faster, while in Russia it's the other way round :)