Heinlein seemed to think they were inflating their population figures to puff up their perceived strength (and the general health and success of their system).
Yes, that is what I recall. I will have to dig out my copies and re-read them. Anyway, from Google Earth, they sure look like small towns. (I spend a lot of time on Google Earth). In fact, what brought up all this was I was taking a virtual Google Earth tour of Russia’ s railway stations (many quite beautiful) and I was noticing that in city after city it seemed more like a small town. Cities we have heard of as being the most prominent in Russia, like Kiev, St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, etc. None of them seemed like much more than small towns.
Anyway, thanks for the responses. It also occurs to me that a lot of Russians simply don’t live in the city at all. As another poster mentioned, it is a big country.
I have noticed that a lot of academics cannot see the forest for the trees.
But they lost like 20 million in WWII, and probably another 30 million to the gulag. Combine that with the low birth rate after the war and you have a significant contraction.
Feshbach is a demographer; the forests are his specialty.
There were plenty of people who visited the Soviet Union for a week or two and came away convinced it was a paradise with prosperity and freedom for all. Obviously they missed the big picture. Why assume Robert and Virginia Heinlein were any better enlightened during their brief visit to the Soviet Union?
Heinlein pointed out that he had been trained in logistical analysis, and was using his training to come up with an estimate. He was looking at the road, rail, and waterway infrastructure and trying to gauge how much population it could support, and he came up with numbers much lower than they should have been. It’s been years since I read that article, but didn’t he also talk about that with some spooks he knew, and get some sort of unofficial confirmation?
In any event, it occurs to me that he may have missed the real reason - if a country says their citizens have a per-capita GDP of X, and a city has X citizens, and then you measure the flow of goods and services and discover that it can’t be right, there are two possibilities - one is that the population is smaller than it is, and the other is that the people aren’t consuming as much as the government says they were.
I find it more likely that Heinlein couldn’t account for the goods because the people weren’t nearly as well off as the government said they were. It wasn’t the size of the population the Soviets were inflating - it was the health of their economy. Heinlein just missed that because at the time no one believed that the Soviet Union’s economy was that bad.
There may have been other factors as well. For example, a black market in goods that would trickle into the city using unconventional means, or locally created and traded products.
And, in too many cases, an entire family lives in an apt that in the USA we think is sized for a single person or perhaps a childless couple. Or that’s what I have been told, anyway.
One big factor was probably a lack of private automobiles. A city of ten million people that don’t own cars is going to be a lot more compact that a city of ten million car owners - so no suburban sprawl.
Heinlein’s analysis had nothing to do with the physical size of the city. It was all about measuring the river and road and rail traffic and determining how much population such a flow of material could support.
This is exactly the type of analysis the CIA does all the time. By tracking shipping in and out of an area, you can tell a whole lot about how many people live there, what kind of people they are, and what kinds of things they might be doing. Heinlein was taught this in the Academy, and used his training for fun while on vacation - and got a strange result.
The building layouts are quite different from what we are used to in the US. The apartment my family lived in was in a relatively newer building in the northwest part of Moscow. The twelve-story building was subdivided into multiple (3 or 4 iirc, it’s been ages) podyezds - mutually inaccessible sections separated from one another along the vertical. My podyezd had four apartments per floor. Most newer residential buildings were similarly laid out though often somewhat smaller - eight to ten floors was the norm.
Many of the older buildings (such as the ones my parents grew up in) were originally the property of nobility or other wealthy types pre-revolution. These had fewer floors but very numerous rooms. Under the Soviet Union, twenty to forty families shared a floor, one family to a room. The big problem was having one bathroom and one kitchen per floor. This was the prevalent form of urban housing in Heinlein’s times, so he was obviously treated to a misrepresentation of the housing situation.
I’ve read the article. I have it to hand, in fact, collected in “Expanded Universe”, and have skimmed the relevant parts again.
Sam Stone is exactly right: Heinlein and his unnamed retired admiral both worked it out as a logistics problem, and it’s likely they both got tripped up by assuming too high of a standard of living and underestimating the black market. (For the record, their guess was 750,000 when the Soviets were claiming 5,000,000.)
Actually, Stranger, dacha ownership is quite widespread even among the regular population in the Soviet Union. I cannot find any USSR-era estimates but the Russian Wiki for dachas puts it at 30 million.
Given that Happy Wanderer puts the Russian population at 50 million, that probably means more than one dacha per family :p.
Nitpick: Kiev is not in Russia
This type of analysis depends crucially on a number of factors and I doubt RAH had accurate figures for any of them. As others have noted it is very likely he overestimated the requirements/expectations of the Soviet population but I would also doubt he could have done more than the most superficial measurement of traffic in and out of Moscow during a short visit. I can’t remember how long he spent in city but did he sit up each night counting trains and barges? Did he account for the seasonal variations in transport patterns, etc, etc.
I don’t think anyone would be surprised if the Soviet’s lied about their population (or anything else when it suited them) but misrepresenting the population of their capital city by factor 6 or 7 - and having nobody other than Heinlein notice or challenge them on it seems unlikely.
Much more than a trickle, according to an article I read a while back on the huge size (and near invisibility) of the parallel economy in Russia (and presumably in the rest of the Soviet Union)
It gave the example of a group of American experts who’d gone to Moscow just after the fall of the USSR to advise on economic matters.
Their initial naïve optimism that they had all the answers soon evaporated as they started to apply the models that had worked in the US.
“We can’t find the economy!” “Why aren’t people starving?”
The official economy had all but totally collapsed at that point, yet the streets weren’t full of starved corpses, in fact people mostly went about their lives as normal - teachers still taught in schools even if they hadn’t been paid for months.
According to the article, the unofficial economy had grown so big and ubiquitous during the Soviet era that it allowed the population to weather the collapse
The OP was comparing the physical size of the cities using Googol Earth.
I’m not disputing that the Soviets probably lied about their population. They lied about plenty of other statistics. But I doubt that they pumped up the figures by more than 10 or 20 percent. No way could they have gotten away with a 300 or 500 percent exaggeration that some people are claiming here.
Well, looking at the physical size of the Orlando metropolitan area, (i.e. from Sanford to Kissimmee and from Winter Garden to Bithlo,) you’d have to conclude that Orlando must be in the top 10 most populous cities in America. (Okay it IS the 26th or so, but it looks freakin huge on a map and from a plane (it’s the only place where from a plane I’ve seen development as far as the eye could see.))
On Interstate 4, midway between Orlando and Tampa, I once saw a billboard reading, “FUTURE SITE OF DOWNTOWN ORLAMPA.”
I think it had something to do with the high-speed rail initiative, but, if so, I’m not clear if it was for it or against it.
I always read that as “buy property here, cause in 30 years this will be a hot and happening place!” With the thrown in assumption of course that this includes high speed rail.
A HSR link between Tampa and Orlando would not necessarily affect the value of rural property midway between, where the train would not be stopping.
Using a similar logic, I should be buying up property in Trenton - the future site of downtown Yorkadelphia.