“In Russian families, many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven or eight children, and maybe even more. We should preserve and revive these wonderful traditions. Large families should be the norm, the way of life for all peoples of Russia,”

Along with traditions such as 3-5 of those children dying before they even reach adulthood?

Next step: Polygamy. Russia has a surplus of woman compared to males because of their long tradition of meatgrinding them in the conflicts of the leader. Because of that, for many russian woman it is not easy to have a native russian life with a native russian man to create a native russian family. This leads to woman accepting domestic abuse as they are glad to not go abroad to find a man. Still, many russian woman in search for a partner to marry, are going abroad. There are Marriage-Mills in china, japan and korea that loath for young russian (western looking) woman, desperate enough to marry a foreigner to fullfill their wish to have children and a family life. So the next step for Putin might be to tell russian woman that they should share the few man he did not crippled in the meat grinder for a polygamist relationship. And the current Orthodox Patriarch Kirill will tell them "this is gods will" like the turncoat he is.

Yes, Putin, go full Hitler. Just get the fuck out of Europe.

Meat for the grinder.

And just like that they're sliding back into the dark ages. Putin wants ignorant masses to exploit.

Crazy to hear that in 2023

I mean, not having women do higher education might bring up fertility rates -- I don't think that there'd a clear answer there. It's true that fertility rates were higher during a period in time when women were in college less, but there were also a number of other societal changes that happened.

But if one doesn't educate women, it runs the risk of probably cutting your GDP significantly, as it halves the size of the pool of people with higher education. That's a costly move.

EDIT: And one other point. If the experiment doesn't work, it's a policy that is hard to back out for a long time. Let's say that you adopt the policy for 10 years. If a woman doesn't get a college education, they're probably going to stay like that for the next ~50 years of their working lives; it's harder and less-effective to go back much later and do adult education. So you're kind of committing to that policy for quite some time to come, and if you don't like the results, you don't really have a lot of way to immediately revert back to the pre-policy environment.

If one wants to try restricting abortions -- also referenced in the article -- or oral contraception or something like that, those are policies that can be readily backed-out if you try them and decide that they don't work well. Not doing higher education for women would be a change to Russia that will be around for a long, long time.

I mean somewhere do the new soldiers need to come from...