Robert Heinlein made a visit to the Soviet Union in 1960, and upon returning wrote of his impressions. One of his strongest was that the population of Moscow was being exaggerated by perhaps an order of magnitude. This was easy to dismiss as Heinlein crackpottery at the time, but now that I am looking at Google Earth, I think he might be right. Compare Moscow with New York, a city with approximately the same population density according to Wiki. Go to Google Earth and study the two. There is no comparison! Moscow looks more like Columbus Ohio, than it does NYC. Same goes for other prominent cities in Russia. They all look like small towns in comparison to even our 2nd tier cities. Check out the buildings, the infrastructure, none of it is commensurate with the population claims being made.
I’m guessing there are about 50 million people in Russia, and they obviously know this and so does our intelligence, but we never have called them on it or publicized it with the exception of Mr. Heinlein’s article.
What say The Dope, have I uncovered one of the biggest lies in history, or am I as cracked as Heinlein?
The CIA World Fact Book give’s Russia’s population as 141 million. Either that figure is more or less right; or the CIA has uncritically accepted the Russian government’s own inflated estimates, which would not be in character; or the CIA knows the figure is lower but for some reason has decided to collude with the Russian government in the deception. Which do you think is more plausible?
Furthermore, if the Russians were claiming nearly three times their actual population, I think some scholar specializing in Soviet/Russian demographic analysis, such as Murray Feshbach, would have twigged to it by now.
Inflating a population figure would take a hell of a lot more than just getting the CIA to agree to report a phony number; you’d have to lie about a million other things. You’d have to hide the real figures from every foreign contractor who worked on a government computer system. You’d have to either hide the country’s true GDP or somehow hide the fact that the average Russian is three times richer than you’re admitting. You’d have to either lie about the size of the armed forces, or you’d be maintaining an army far bigger than you could support.
The OP seems to be based on the assumption that a Russian city should look the same as an American city when viewed on an internet map site, which does not strike me as being the most scientific of approaches.
And to be honest, I don’t even buy the OP’s observation. For fun, I looked at Moscow on Google Earth, and compared it to cities of varying sizes. The urbal sprawl looks consistent with Moscow’s alleged size (about 10 million.) It is definitely smaller than metropolitan New York, which is at least 17 million, and quite obviously larger than metropolitan Toronto, about five million.
Remember that the Soviet Union was a very large country, land area wise. It’s like back in 1992 when I ran into some German tourists at Mesa Verde in SW Colorado. They asked where all the people were, because they couldn’t believe that the land was so lightly populated.
Also remember that pre-WWII, our cities were much more compact. Minneapolis had roughly 400,000 population on less than it’s current land use. Suburbs were villages, not the sprawling land wasters we now know. Then translate that to a more centrally controlled, old world nation state. It only makes sense that cities were much smaller in area.
If you consider how many people the SU put under arms in WWII, there is just no way in heck they could have done that with a population of just 50 million. At least not while maintaining any actual food and materials production.
I suspect Heinlein did, and to a lesser extent you do, massively overestimate the standard of living esp. the housing situation. Perhaps Heinlein was invited to the home of privileged people (they would be privileged, being involved in things like a foreign writer’s officially sponsored visit) and went away with the idea of decent sized apartments and one nuclear family per apartment.
Heinlein’s visit wasn’t officially sponsored, nor did he go on a typical tourist’s trip. Robert and Virginia saw the grubby underside of the Soviet Union, and formed their opinions with that in mind. He definitely knew about their quality of life re: housing.
I visited the USSR on a state-sponsored visit in 1990. If they were showing me the best that Leningrad/St Petersburg had to offer, well, I wasn’t too impressed. It was nice enough, but hardly luxurious.
My memories of driving around Moscow consist of miles and miles of concrete multistorey spawl. I suspect that’s where all the people are. Someone somewhere has a video of us playing soccer in Red Square. I’d pay money to find that.
I suspect Heinlin may have failed to comprehend just how big Russia is. Sure, any given part of it may seem relatively unpopulated; but there’s just so damn *much * of it, that eventualy, it adds up.
As several invaders discovered, you can walk through Russia for days and weeks and months, and all you’ll see around you is more and more Russia. It never, ever ends.
If Moscow’s population was so blatantly inflated that the OP could notice it just by looking at a google image, I suspect that at least some of the millions of foreign visitors this city receive each year would have noticed it as well.
That section of the article dealt particularly with Moscow, taking into account transportation infrastructure more than housing if I recall correctly: roads, trains, river, and so on. Certainly extrapolating that to the remainder of the USSR may have been a stretch, but I believe he made a convincing case that the population of Moscow was officially overstated.
P.S. The names of the two articles on the Heinleins’ Soviet tour were “Pravda Means Truth” and “Inside Intourist”. Both were most recently published in the collection Expanded Universe. Neither appears to be available online.
Looks to me, Happy Wanderer, that you’ve never actually been to Moscow. The way the city’s laid out is absolutely not similar to NYC, let alone any other US city. The same goes for other Russian cities. US cities, correct me if i’m wrong, tend to consist of large suburban sprawls and one-floor buildings. Moscow, on the other hand, has no suburban areas, or, for that matter, one-floor buildings. My guess is that a very sizeable (as in: 75 % or more) live in high-rise buildings of around 10 floors. Having lived in Russia, I would say that the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation may have lied (and may still be lying) about a whole lot of things, but not about their population.
Except, according to the OP, his claim wasn’t about Russia specifically, but about Moscow in particular.
Interestingly, the Moscow wiki article speculates that the opposite is true. That a large number of undocumented immigrants/guest workers mean that Moscow’s population is much larger then the offical census of ~10 mil. Of course, that’s todays Moscow, no idea what the situation was in the 60’s
Does Russia even have suburbs in the North American sense? It’s my understanding that new single family homes simple weren’t built (except in rural areas) in the Soviet Union. All new housing consisted of apartment blocks. Not only that but the same plans were used over and over again all over the USSR.
One more thing about the suggestion that there’s about 90 million hoaxed Russians: here’s a link to what wikipedia tells us about Russian demographics. It tells us that the Russian population has been declining. This is recognized as a serious problem by the Russian government, who are trying to promote child-bearing by any means possible.
Now if that is in fact the case, and the Russian government is coming forward with this information, what incentive could they possibly have to lie about their real population?
It seems to me there is a lot of confusion between “what Russia today says” and what “the Soviet Union almost fifty-years” ago said.
Heinlein didn’t visit the USSR anytime in the last forty-years.
I do know that the USSR underestimated its wartime losses in WWII–in order to try and hide just how gargantuan their losses were. This made sense, since the USSR had some reason to fear the other Allies may have decided to try and fight them over Eastern Europe (as it was, the Soviets always tended to be a bit more worried about us than they probably should have been–Roosevelt never had any intentions of fighting the soviets over Eastern Europe and it’s doubtful the American people would have stood for it.)
Well one of the mistakes being made here is that the New York Metro area is about 21.362 million people. So if Moscow looks about half the size that’s because it’s roughly 40% smaller at 13.1 million.
The Heinlein’s booked their trip and guides through Intourist, the Soviet governnment travel bureau, which was the only way for foreign visitors to tour the Soviet Union at that time. Although Virginia Heinlein was reportedly fluent in the Russian language and they made several attempts to go outside the proscribed standard tour destinations, they did not explore enough of Moscow or any other Soviet city in detail to form reliable estimates regarding population.
As others have pointed out, Soviet cities were not built like the cities of Western Europe or North America. Most Soviet cities in the Ukraine and eastern Russia were heavily damaged during the war; when they were rebuilt they were intentionally built with high population density residences that were relatively close to industrial zones, and even at that there were often two or more families sharing a flat that would be considered suitable for only one (small) family by Western standards of living. Obtaining one’s own flat was a rare privilege in the Soviet Union. Because of this, and the paucity of personal automobiles and freeway infrastructure, the cities are much more compact than European or especially American cities of similar population size. As others have noted, Russian cities don’t have much in the way of suburbs; you go from city blocks and industrial zones to woodlands. The only suburbs to speak of are the dachas owned by the powerful and influentials. American cities, in contrast, are great sprawling expanses with extensive suburbs in no small part due to the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. They’re to completely different species of fruit.
It is true, however, that the Soviet Union lost a substantial amount of population in famines of the early 1920’s, the purges of the 1930’s, and in the war. It is impossible to accurately assess how many were lost but it was certainly on the order of tens of millions. Still, with all that, the Soviet Union was huge, and in the postwar era reproduction was encourages and even in some areas subsidised. That policy came to an end sometime after Stalin’s death, and because of the low standard of living the birthrate declined dramatically in the late 'Sixties and 'Seventies, becoming negative at some point well before the fall of the Soviet Union. Currently, Russia and many of the former East Bloc client states have impending problems with negative growth rates.
As for why the Soviet Union would want to exaggerate their population size, it might be done in order to conceal the extent of loss during the war, plus the losses during the purges, in order not to make the nation look weaker. But I don’t think they could get away with claiming population sizes that were exaggerated by an order of magnitude. There are too many traceable indicators (like energy use, grain consumption, et cetera) that would demonstrate the falsity of such a claim.
