La Russophobe thanks reader NATALIA for providing a link on Russian divorce statistics. The link shows that Belarus leads the world in divorce with 68% of all marriages ending in destruction of the family, with Russia close behind in second place at 65% of all marriages resulting in divorce.

Of course, this is not suprising given the information La Russophobe has already reported about the number of women killed by their husbands and children killed by their parents. Indeed, in light of that, those in divorce households may well be the lucky ones, and anyone who marries in Russia should be viewed as a national hero.

Russia's divorce rate is 33% higher than that of the United States, according to the article. However, America actually has slightly more divorces per 1,000 people because a far higher fraction of the population gets married in the United States compared to Russia. This too is not surprising, since family brutality would obviously tend to undermine the attractiveness of the institution of marriage. Indeed, most Russian marriages are not really solemnized with anything like the seriousness of the American rituals; Russians still generally head off to their local ZAGS office, another holdover from Soviet times, where the brief ceremony is often viewed like the joke it really is. The involvement of the church has been destroyed for many people, hardly anyone can afford a real honeymoon (much less a real diamond), and often the whole thing degenerates into a vast drinking binge to be quickly followed by divorce proceedings.