Previously in 1950, the USSR had a significantly larger population than the USA. Today, Russia has a population less than half that of the US. Has this significantly affected the balance of power between them?

 

The USSR was always far ahead of the US in terms of population. The gap was largest at at the start of WW2, with almost 200 million on our side against 133 million in America. However, the power balance at the time was obviously not in our favor, to say the least.

In terms of global influence, economy and military might, the USSR reached the zenith much later, by the mid-1970s. In America, this was the era of upheaval and despondence. Not much to boast of in Europe either, the NATO was clearly weakened, too. Our coffers in the meantime were bulging with petrodollars, we were seriously courting the Germans, and many influential Europeans pondered if the “Russians” might be better friends to them than the Americans.

At the same time however, we were running out of people. The walls in public places were plastered with long lists of vacancies in building, construction, transport and industry. Productivity stalled, booze was ever-present in the work places. Abortions were the most popular way of birth control. A lot of people in the provinces, especially in the countryside, were downright killing themselves by alcoholism, senseless violence, negligence of safety rules and reckless driving.

This was a far echo of the lethal blow dealt by Stalin to the demographic might of old Russia when he had crushed our private peasantry. However, the impetus from the two waves of industrialization in the 1930s and after WW2 was enough for us to challenge the West in the 1970s and early 1980s like never before.

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Below, an ethnically-themed piece of art by Lubsan Dordzhiyev. It’s dedicated to the joint space project Soyuz-Apollo between the USSR and USA

. In 1975, we made it a huge propaganda event: it visualized the parity that the USSR achieved not only in global politics and arms race, but also in cool high technology with the Americans. Their participation was the living proof that also the Americans viewed us as equals.

Lubsan Dordzhiyev was an ethnic Buryat

(Mongolian). Hence, his vision of the three astronauts and two cosmonauts sharing two stallions on their travel around the Earth.

(c) Lubsan Dordzhiyev