Was the population of Moscow wildly overstated during the Cold War?

Question

The science fiction author Robert Heinlein was a socialist in his youth, but became a strident anticommunist during the Cold War. In 1960, he and his wife Virginia went as tourists to the USSR, and he wrote a magazine article about the experience, titled "Inside Intourist." He depicts the trip as interesting, but filthy, overpriced, and highly restricted by the presence of official minders. Virginia spoke fluent Russian, Robert just a little. They made a game out of evading control and seeing things they weren't supposed to see (like slums), and they made attempts to gather reality-check information on things like how much money people made and what their standard of living was.

The article was anthologized twenty years later, with an afterword in which Heinlein discusses at some length his theory that official figures on the population of Moscow were wildly overstated.

At that time the USSR claimed a population of 225,000,000 and claimed a population for Moskva of 5,000,000+... For many days we prowled Moskva--by car, by taxi when we did not want Intourist with us, by subway, by bus, and on foot. In the meantime, Mrs. Heinlein, in her fluent Russian, got acquainted with many people... she is a warm person. But, buried in the chitchat, she always learned these things: How old are you? Are you married? How many children do you have?

Meanwhile, Robert was looking at traffic on the river and comparing with shipping on the Rhine or the Panama Canal. He told Virginia that he thought the city felt to him like it had a population of 600,000 to 800,000, not five million. Virginia agreed:

"It's a lie. Unless they are breeding like flies everywhere outside Moscow, they have lost population since the War--not gained. I haven't found even one family with more than three children. The average is less than two. And they marry late. Robert, they aren't even replacing themselves."

Robert then says:

About a year later I had a chance to discuss it with an old shipmate, an admiral now retired...I asked him how many people there were in Moscow... "Make a guess. You must have some idea." ... He closed his eyes and kept quiet for several minutes. "Seven hundred and fifty thousand, not over that... I simply worked it as a logistics problem, War College style. But I had to stop and visualize the map first. Roads, rivers, railroads, size of marshalling yards, and so forth... The city just doesn't have the transportation facilities to be any bigger than that."

Is it possible that the USSR's official statements about the population of Moscow in that era were really inflated by an order of magnitude? It seems like modern demographers ought easily to have been able to notice such a huge discrepancy. Even a very crude post-Soviet census should have been able to detect it, e.g., by simply checking the number of old people in 1995 and seeing whether there were enough of them to account for the cohorts 35 years younger in 1960.

Answer 1

Russian urbanization in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras (2012), p. 22, states:

However, the GPW rapidically reshaped the population dynamics of the region. Even as late as 1959, the populations of St Petersburg and nearby cities remained far below their pre-war levels, and the Moscow conurbation had shrunk back towards its centre. In constrast, nonfront-line cities such as Orenburg, Ufa and Chelyabinsk experienced growth. For the rest of the Soviet period, the Moscow conurbation would grow towards these unscathed areas –

Note that GPW = Great Patriotic War in the above quote.

On p. 20 this paper notes that Moscow was growing by annexation in 1960:

today’s cities have swallowed thousands of smaller settlements (in 1960 alone, Moscow was expanded to incorporate 150 villages)

So Moscow had lost population following the GPW, and the conurbation of Moscow had shrunk back towards it's center; to increase the official size of city it absorbed 150 nearby villages in 1960.

These two statements imply that the land area of the City of Moscow included many not-so-urban areas, and would have appeared very different than a similarly sized city in America, circa 1960.

Some of the statements attributed to Heinlein as "proof" don't stand up to even cursory analysis: why should shipping on the Moskva River be comparable to that of one of the busiest river systems in the world, the Rhine?

Are Heinlein's outlandish conjectures realistic? No, they are not. But the situation he observed was indeed that of a city that had suffered during the recent "Great Patriotic War", and should indeed have seemed a bit hollow in 1960. Moscow's official population was pumped up by incorporating 150 villages just that year - at 10,000 per village (a typical number for the very urban Germany), that would add 1,500,000 people! So if the official population was 5 million, then the inner regions held only 3.5 million.

Today it is over 11 million, with over 17 million in the larger metro region.

Additional note: The Soviet Union conducted a new census in January of 1959; footnote 1 links to a detailed analysis of Soviet census falsifications, but does not discuss the census of 1959. The 6th footnote is a report on the census of 1959; it states that the first preliminary results were published in May of 1959. The analysis provided is worth reading. Footnote 7 reports on the migration from rural to urban areas: 33% urban in 1939, increasing to 48% urban in 1959. This means that all cities were growing rapidly, despite the loss of population from GPW.

Answer 2

I would have made first page headlines in the early 90s if true. No, I think Heinlein was led to this conclusion by ideology more than by observation.

ETA: A source about the subject:

Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis, by Timothy J. Colton

Answer 3

He told Virginia that he thought the city felt to him like it had a population of 600,000 to 800,000, not five million.

Such assumption is clearly wrong and marks your source as highly unreliable.

Is it possible that the USSR's official statements about the population of Moscow in that era were really inflated by an order of magnitude?

First population census held in 1897 in the time of Russian Empire. According to it, Moscow (should I remind that it wasn't a capital city at that time?) population already was slightly more than 1 million. And later Moscow population only grew on as all subsequent census show.

So any "estimate" less than 800,000 is totally absurd and needs no other disproof.

Answer 4

Traffic on the river is absolutely irrelevant, Moskva river is not used much for transportation, neither for people, nor for goods. I do not know how one can make conclusions from this. At most people use tourist ships over it. Why one would use river if there is a lot of metro and commuter trains? Comparing to Panama Canal which connects two hemispheres is totally out of sense.

The census of 2002 had shown 10,382,754 official (permanent) residents (not counting illegal/temporary migrants, those who rents realty).

The census of 2010 had shown 11,503,501 official (permanent) residents.