I was just wondering what the most realistic estimate for the population of Moscow would be, circa 1944/1945?
SF writer Robert A. Heinlein was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, and took a tour of the Soviet Union in 1960. At that time, Russia was claiming a population of several million – three IIRC – for Moscow. He and his wife, a retired Navy officer herself, surreptitiously did a “logistics assessment” of the city while they were there, purely out of curiosity because it didn’t seem like that large a city to them. They came up with an estimate of 750,000 for 1960.
Shortly after returning to the U.S. he had dinner with an Annapolis classmate who was now an admiral, and who had been taught to do logistics assessments professionally at the War College. Heinlein mentioned the disparity between the claimed population and what his own estimate was to the admiral, who without having heard Heinlein’s figure did a shirt-cuff estimate of his own based on his knowledge of Moscow’s “carrying capacity” in terms of what could be moved in and out of the city, and came up with the same figure. Both Heinlein and the admiral mentioned in passing an estimate of 500,000 for the war years.
Source: Heinlein’s retrospective collection Expanded Universe
That’s not a number you’re apt to see confirmed in official documents anywhere. But it’s probably the best estimate of the actual 1945 population available anywhere outside classified circles.
That was the first thing I thought of, too, Poly.
I later heard that Heinlein recanted but don’t have any specifics. Maybe he was just making nice.
Though, um, that seems unlikely given his opinions on the Soviets.
I know longer have Expanded Universe, but I believe he says that at the time the Soviet Union was claiming 7 million in Moscow, making it larger than any US city of the day.
And I concur with Poly and Chance, that the number they claimed, based on known infrastructure, river traffic and outlying agricultural areas, seems to be 750,000.
Gotta love that Cold War mentality.