Question: Why did Russia lose less population than other nations during plagues?
About the article "Russia", section "Grand Duchy of Moscow".

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"Rhye's and Fall of Civilization" is set on Earth and is designed to mirror a historical Earth as closely as possible.
A player can start the game in either 3000 BC or 600 AD.
If players start as an ancient power, such as the Roman Empire, the game is designed to simulate the historical collapse of these empires into newer states.
For instance, if Rome has spread throughout Western Europe in the Classical Era, in 400–800 AD, France, Germany, Spain and England will rise from Rome's territory.
A British Empire established during the Middle Ages, if expanding in North America, will have most of its North American territories become the United States of America in 1775–1776 AD.
Players can also "change history" and play a nation to an end that did not occur in the real world.
Germany, for instance, is capable of winning World War II and controlling most of Europe.
The United States and Russia may also engage in World War III.
Middle Eastern nations, such as Persia and Egypt become very aggressive in the 20th century part of the game and start wars for little or no apparent reason.
A fanatical Middle Eastern nation with nuclear weapons is also a very real possibility.
Each civilization also gets a passive power based on its history.
For example, Russia has a power, called "General Winter", that makes enemy units inside its borders take a small amount of damage, while England has a power that gives its naval units two extra first strike chances called "The Power of the Royal Navy".
One of the main features of "Rhye's and Fall of Civilization" is the game's ability to monitor the stability of national governments, taking into account war, disease, corruption, invasion, and other factors which might influence the fall of a nation.
If a "major power" controlled by the AI in the game becomes extremely unstable, the territory held by the nation will break apart into several independent nations.
These smaller countries are distinct from the barbarian nation, and do not normally attack major nations unless attacked first.
However, when a human player collapses, all cities but his capital, and sometimes another city, collapses into independent nations.
Usually, other countries near the cities that declared independence may send their army over to conquer them.
After one civilization has discovered nationalism, ancient or collapsed civilizations may respawn, either in independent lands or in lands belonging to relatively unstable civilizations.
For example, in the nineteenth century the Greek civilization may declare its independence from an occupying power, which is usually the Ottoman Empire.
The game spawns plagues randomly through the world around certain dates; for example, a plague will generally begin in the 14th–15th century to simulate the Black Death.
Plague spreads from country to country, entering cities.
A city afflicted with plague will lose one population point per turn, as well as a hefty unhealthiness penalty; in addition, town improvements will shrink back to cottage size.
Units garrisoned in or close to plague-affected cities will take damage until they die or the plague ends.
The more health bonuses that a civilization has, the faster the plague ends.
Plagues can be permanently avoided by a nation once the technology "Medicine" is researched.
"Rhye's and Fall of Civilization" is also designed to simulate the drastic impact that the arrival of Europeans had in the New World.
Upon sailing any unit from Europe to America, the player is instantly granted several military units to simulate the exploits of the Spanish conquistadors.
This also spawns a plague exclusively amongst the Native American nations to simulate smallpox.
Unless they are destroyed by the conquistadors, American civilizations such as the Aztecs and the Mayans typically become vassals to colonial powers, including Spain, France, Britain and Portugal.
British expansion in North America usually comes to an end when the territory changes to that of America in 1776 AD although it is possible for Britain to maintain a presence in Canada.
Africa can also be explored but without instant free units.
The African continent contains major nations such as Egypt, Ethiopia and the Mali Empire.
The "deeper" into Africa a player explores they encounter small tribal villages inhabited by native units which act the same as barbarians.
Besides the typical victory conditions in the game, every civilization has another victory option – Unique Historical Victories.
These usually include two historical achievements that the nation managed, and another one that the country attempted.
For example, Rome's Unique Historical Victory is to have all cities of population at least five must all be connected by road and have a barracks, amphitheatre and aqueduct, emulate (at least) the reaches of the Western Roman Empire by 450 AD, and never lose any city to barbarians by 1000 AD.
Upon completing two Unique Historical Victories, a Triumphal Arch is built in the capital which increases military unit production, and a new golden age starts.
Once three civilizations discover the "Nationalism" technology, World Congresses will occur once every 25 turns.
Major nations are invited to participate.
Each civilization has the opportunity to choose from a list of cities which they would like to occupy; the others then vote yes, no or abstain.
For the city to change control, there must simply be more "yes" than "no" votes, and the change takes place instantaneously.
If a city controlled by a human is voted to be handed over, the player can either comply or refuse the decision; refusing may mean war with nations who voted "yes."
World Congresses end once the United Nations has been built.
In "Rhye's and Fall of Civilization", not every country starts at the same time.
In the 3000 BC starting scenario, only Egypt, Babylon, China and India are initially present; in the 600 AD start, only China, Japan, the Vikings and Arabia (along with the unplayable Byzantine Empire) are initially present.
Other nations such as Spain and Turkey appear later in the game (at 720 AD and 1280 AD respectively).
Until the research of Nationalism, civilizations were able to hire mercenary units, and also hire out their own units.
In order to hire a mercenary unit, a lump sum of gold is required to be paid, and you must also pay a maintenance cost for the unit, as for other military units.
Typically, the more experienced a unit is the more gold it costs to hire, and hiring out a more experienced unit also increases gold received.
Mercenary units have a civilization's name (or a barbarian city's name) attached as a prefix e.g.
Thracian Crossbowman or Egyptian Swordsman.
A unit being hired out can be recalled at any time, arriving in the civilization's capital three turns after it is recalled.
In Rhye's and Fall of Civilization, every civilization has different research and expansion rates.
For example, before the nineteenth century the Europeans are technologically backwards to civilizations like Arabia, Turkey and China.
But after that the Europeans become the more advanced civilizations (to reflect the Industrial Revolution in actual history) and leave Asian civilizations in the dust.
Civilizations like Arabia and Mongolia tend to expand a lot, whereas Mali and Egypt stick to the rivers Niger and Nile respectively.
The inclusion of fan scenarios in "Beyond the Sword" was well received by critics.
"Rhye's and Fall of Civilization" was singled out for praise by several reviewers.
Tom Chick of Yahoo!
Games called it "one of the most exciting and robust mods you'll ever see for a game", while GameSpot's Andrew Park said it "provided a fresh new coat of paint to the core Civilization gameplay".
A review of "" also praised Rhye's and Fall for being superior to the official Firaxis game mods.
Due to the mod's high popularity, "Rhye's and Fall of Civilization" has had a number of fan-created mods that make changes to the mod itself.
("modmods") These serve a variety of functions, from lengthening the number of turns, to totally converting the mod, with entirely new units, buildings, civilizations, and tech tree.
Two particularly prominent modmods are "Dawn of Civilization" which balances the game and adds some extra content to help guide the game world along a more plausible path and "Civilizations in Abundance" which increases the number of playable civilizations by adding every playable nation that was in the original "" game.
In addition, there have been a number of total conversions of RFC that apply the RFC mechanics to a smaller region.
So far, there are 3 major regional RFC modmods in a fairly complete stage: "Rhye's and Fall of Europe", focusing on medieval and early modern Europe, "The Sword of Islam", focusing on the medieval Middle East, and " Rhye's and Fall of Asia".
A number of others are in developmental or alpha stage, such as "Rhye's and Fall of Mesoamerica and the Andes", "Rhye's and Fall of Britannia", "Rhye's and Fall of South and Southeast Asia", "Rhye's and Fall of Africa", "Rhye's and Fall Germania" and "Rhye's and Fall Classical World".
More mods can be found at the RFC subforum on the CivFanatics Forums. 
Historians have suggested that the plagues are passed-down accounts of several natural disasters, some disconnected, others playing part of a chain reaction.
Natural explanations have been suggested for most of the phenomena:  Plague 1 — water turned into blood; fish died * Dr. Stephen Pflugmacher, a biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Water Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin believes that rising temperatures could have turned the Nile into a slow-moving, muddy watercourse -conditions favorable for the spread of toxic fresh water algae.
As the bacterium, known as Burgundy Blood algae, dies, it turns the water red.
* Alternatively, a bloody appearance could be due to an environmental change, such as a drought, which could have contributed to the spread of the Chromatiaceae bacteria which thrive in stagnant, oxygen-deprived water.
Plague 2 — frogs * Any blight on the water that killed fish also would have caused frogs to leave the river and probably die.
Plagues 3 and 4 — biting insects and flies * The lack of frogs in the river would have let insect populations, normally kept in check by the frogs, increase massively.
The rotting corpses of fish and frogs would have attracted significantly more insects to the areas near the Nile.
Plagues 5 and 6 — livestock disease and boils * There are biting flies in the region which transmit livestock diseases; a sudden increase in their number could spark epidemics.
Plague 7 — fiery hail   Plague 8 — locusts * According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), when they get hungry, a one-ton horde of locusts can eat the same amount of food in one day as 2,500 humans.
Plague 9 — darkness * The immediate cause of this plague was probably the "hamsin", a south or south-west wind charged with sand and dust, which blows about the spring equinox and at times produces darkness rivaling that of the worst London fogs.
Plague 10 — death of the firstborn * If the last plague indeed selectively tended to affect the firstborn, it could be due to food polluted during the time of darkness, either by locusts or by the black mold Cladosporium.
When people emerged after the darkness, the firstborn would be given priority, as was usual, and would consequently be more likely to be affected by any toxin or disease carried by the food.
Meanwhile, the Israelites ate food prepared and eaten very quickly which would have made it less likely to be infected.
In the 2006 documentary Exodus Decoded, filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici hypothesised the selectiveness of the tenth plague was under the circumstances similar to the 1986 disaster of Lake Nyos that is related to geological activities that caused the previous plagues in a related chain of events.
The hypothesis was that the plagues took place shortly after the eruption of Thera (now known as Santorini), which happened some time between 1550 BCE and 1650 BCE, and recently narrowed to between 1627–1600 BCE, with a 95% probability of accuracy.
Jacobovici however places the eruption in 1500 BCE.
According to the documentary, the eruption sets off a chain of events resulting in the plagues and eventually the killing of the first born.
Jacobovici suggests that the first borns in ancient Egypt had the privilege to sleep close to the floor while other children slept on higher ground or even on roofs.
This view, however, is not supported by any archaeological or historical evidence.
As in Lake Nyos, when carbon dioxide or other toxic gases escape the surface tension of a nearby waterbody because of either geological activity or over-saturation, the gas, being heavier than air, "flooded" the nearby area displacing oxygen and killing those who were in its path.
A volcanic eruption which happened in antiquity and could have caused some of the plagues if it occurred at the right time.
The eruption of the Thera volcano was to the northwest of Egypt.
Controversially dated to about 1628 BC, this eruption is one of the largest on record, rivaling that of Tambora, which resulted in 1816's Year Without a Summer.
The enormous global impact of this eruption has been recorded in an ash layer deposit found in the Nile delta, tree ring frost scars in the bristlecone pines of the western United States, and a coating of ash in the Greenland ice caps, all dated to the same time and with the same chemical fingerprint as the ash from Thera.
However, all estimates of the date of this eruption are hundreds of years before the Exodus is believed to have taken place; thus the eruption can only have caused some of the plagues if one or other of the dates is wrong, or if the plagues did not actually immediately precede the Exodus.
Following the assumption that at least some of the details are accurately reported, many modern Jews believe that some of the plagues were indeed natural disasters, but argue for the fact that, since they followed one another with such uncommon rapidity, "God's hand was behind them".
Indeed, several Biblical commentators (Nachmanides and, more recently, Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetzky) have pointed out that, for the plagues to be a real test of faith, they had to contain an element leading to religious doubt.
In his book "The Plagues of Egypt: Archaeology, History, and Science Look at the Bible", Siro Igino Trevisanato explores the theory that the plagues were initially caused by the Santorini eruption in Greece.
His hypothesis considers a two-stage eruption over a time of a bit less than two years.
His studies place the first eruption in 1602 BC, when volcanic ash taints the Nile, causing the first plague and forming a catalyst for many of the subsequent plagues.
In 1600 BC, the plume of a Santorini eruption caused the ninth plague, the days of darkness.
Trevisanato hypothesizes that the Egyptians (at that time under the occupation of Hyksos), resorted to human sacrifice in an attempt to appease the gods, for they had viewed the ninth plague as a precursor to more.
This human sacrifice became known as the tenth plague.
In an article published in 1996, physician-epidemiologist John S. Marr and co-author Curt Malloy integrated biblical, historical and Egyptological sources with modern scientific conjectures in a comprehensive review of natural explanations for the ten plagues, postulating their own specific explanations for the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and tenth plagues.
Their explanation also accounted for the apparent selectiveness of the plagues, as implied in the Bible.
The paper served as the basis for a website and documentary aired on the Learning Channel from 1998 to 2005.
The original article is now available in an updated and illustrated form in Apple's iBookstore through plaguescapes. 
The reason for the plagues appears to be twofold: to answer Pharaoh's taunt, “Who is Yahweh, that I should obey his voice to let Israel go?” and to indelibly impress the Israelites with Yahweh's power as an object lesson for all time, which was also meant to become known “throughout the world”.
According to the Torah, God hardened Pharaoh's heart so he would be strong enough to persist in his unwillingness to release the people, so that God could manifest his great power and cause it to be declared among the nations, so that other people would discuss it for generations afterward.
In this view, the plagues were punishment for the Egyptians' long abuse of the Israelites, as well as proof that the gods of Egypt were powerless by comparison.
If God triumphed over the gods of Egypt, a world power at that time, then the people of God would be strengthened in their faith, although they were a small people, and would not be tempted to follow the deities that God put to shame.
Exodus portrays Yahweh explaining why he did not accomplish the freedom of the Israelites immediately:  
The "arbitrazh" courts have been singled out as particularly effective in dealing with business issues.
Also, the number of people seeking assistance of the judicial system has increased from 1 million under Yeltsin to 6 million under Putin.
However, Transparency International found that 78% of respondents reported they did not expect to find justice in the courts.
Both public perception and comments from senior judges point to bribery as prevalent at the trial court level.
There have been serious violations of the accepted separation of powers doctrine.
Constitutional Court Judge and Council of Judges member Vladimir Yaroslavtsev, in a 2009 interview with the Spanish newspaper El País, claimed that the presidential executive office and security services had undermined judicial independence in Russia.
Constitutional Court Judge Anatoly Kononov, who had frequently dissented from decisions taken by the majority of the court, in his interview to Sobesednik supported Yaroslavtsev, claiming that there was no independent judiciary in Russia.
There have been accusations of systematic attempts to undermine jury trials, including juror intimidation and bribery, and systematic trial delays.
The number of jury trials remains small, at about 600 per year, out of about 1 million trials.
Lawmakers are continuously chipping away at what types of criminal offenses merit a jury trial.
Juries have granted acquittals in 15-20% of cases, compared with less than 1% in cases decided by judges.
Juries may be dismissed and skeptical juries have been dismissed on the verge of verdicts, and acquittals are frequently overturned by higher courts.
Compared to other industrialized nations, Russia has historically had a small number of lawyers in relation to its population.
In 2002 there were 47,000 defense lawyers in all of Russia, while the courts sentenced about 1 million people for criminal offenses and considered 3 million administrative offenses and 2.5 million civil cases, and the Russian Census of 2002 put the resident population at more than 145 million people.
For a comparison to the United States, the number of active lawyers practicing before the judiciary of California as of was more than 179,000, while the 2010 United States Census put the California population at more than 37 million people.
The court chairperson has sole discretion for allocation of court cases, and there is no systematic procedure for allocation based on objective criteria.
There have been reports where the chairperson always assigns sensitive cases to particular judges or transfers cases to another judge during an ongoing trial.
There have been allegations of corruption concerning the oral exam required for admission to the "", known as being "called to the bar" in commonwealth countries. 
Though the Mari people have lived in the area for millennia, they did not have a designated territory before the Russian Revolution of 1917.
According to the 2002 Census only 51.7% of the Mari within Russia live in the Mari El Republic, while 17.5% live in the Republic of Bashkortostan.
During the last Soviet Census (1989), 4% of the Mari of the Soviet Union lived outside of Russia.
Since World War II, more ethnic Russians and Tatars have moved into the area.
According to the 2010 Census, Russians make up 47.4% of the republic's population, while the ethnic Mari make up 43.9%.
Other groups include Tatars (5.8%), Chuvash (0.9%), Ukrainians (0.6%), and a host of smaller groups, each accounting for less than 0.5% of the total population.