Hierarchical Urban Systems in Soviet Russia Revisited

Russia’s urban structure does not follow the rank-and-size rule, which Hill and Gaddy attributed to the legacy of the Soviet Union’s administrative and directive planned economy. However, this study constructed a dataset of all cities in the former Soviet Republic from all population censuses and tested the validity of the rank and size rule in each census year to obtain more comprehensive conclusions. First, the Soviet Union’s urban hierarchical structure generally conformed to rank and size rules. Second, although the Soviet urban structure deviated from the rank-size rule between 1939 and 1959, the Soviet hierarchical urban structure tended to converge with the traditional rank-size rule in the last 30 years of the Soviet regime, up to 1989. The evolution of the hierarchical urban structure in the Soviet Union cannot be considered as a product of development policies based on administrative and directive planning and economic systems.