There's a random wholesome story from Russia: 121-year-old grandma Yakha Khashagova from Chechnya voted in an election. Her passport says she was born in 1905, which would make her the oldest person in the world. I decided to check the story. No Imperial Russian, or any other, birth certificate survived, but that's not particularly surprising for Chechnya. Other details are definitely less believable.

Yakha says she was deported to Kazakhstan in 1944, where she married a Chechen shepherd. Together they had 11 children, five of whom died, leaving six alive. This sounds perfectly plausible, until you remember that, according to her 1905 birth date, she was already 39 when she married and then continued having children for many years. Her last child was reportedly born in 1964, when she would have been 59.

The whole story makes a lot more sense if she was born closer to 1920, very possibly with no documents to speak of, and then had a passport issued well into adulthood that gave her year of birth as 1905 -- either by mistake or simply because nobody knew her exact date of birth. By the 2010s, it had become something Kadyrov could boast about, and there was little incentive to correct it, considering that Chechnya has the highest divorce-to-marriage ratio (on paper) in Russia, as well as the highest share of disabled people (also on paper), allowing healthy people and enact families to receive the relevant benefits.

Oh well. There are lies, damned lies, statistics, and Caucasus statistics. Here's to her becoming the oldest person in the world in 15 years anyway!