The population of Moscow was wildly overstated during the Cold War
the verdict
INSUFFICIENT LEANING
refutedsupported
the weight of evidence
3 sources for · 0 against
AS REPORTEDno primary record reached; this is what the reporting says
Retrieved sources contain anecdotal accounts and historical discussions in message boards and books suggesting that certain observers, such as Robert Heinlein, believed Soviet population figures were exaggerated, but there is insufficient comprehensive evidence to fully establish that Moscow's population was systematically and wildly overstated across the entire Cold War.
... Moscow attempted to shield from view . But they shared a conviction that the Kremlin was uniquely vulnerable on this ... population pitched the figure as low as eight million , let alone four . By scouring the letters column of ...
This provocative history of early cold war America recreates a time when World War III seemed imminent. Headlines were dominated by stories of Soviet slave laborers, brainwashed prisoners in Korea, and courageous escapees like Oksana Kasenkina who made a "leap for freedom" from the Soviet Consulate in New York. Full of fascinating and forgotten stories, Cold War Captives explores a central dimension of American culture and politics—the postwar preoccupation with captivity. "Menticide," the calculated destruction of individual autonomy, struck many Americans as a more immediate danger than nuclear annihilation. Drawing upon a rich array of declassified documents, movies, and reportage—from national security directives to films like The Manchurian Candidate—his book explores the ways in whic
Wartime population of Moscow? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
# Wartime population of Moscow?
Mr.Kobayashi February 26, 2005, 11:29pm 1
I was just wondering what the most realistic estimate for the population of Moscow would be, circa 1944/1945?
Polycarp February 27, 2005, 3:05am 2
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 “carry
Soviet Union/Russia lying about population, and we go along. - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board
# Soviet Union/Russia lying about population, and we go along.
Stan_Shmenge March 30, 2008, 5:27pm 1
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 excep
Everything we examined (3) — 2 independent sources
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