alternatehistory.com

I've been trying to, for a bit of an ongoing backburner project, to work out the approximate population size and characteristics for a Russian Empire that never fell in the aftermath of the First World War. Roughly speaking, I'm assuming it would suffer approximately equivalent war casualties to OTL for now, but that the Civil War's carnage would be minimized or outright removed. Territorially, I imagine that Poland would gain its independence at least, perhaps it would end up in the interwar Soviet borders roughly, or possibly a territory like that of the modern Soviet Union.

The core of the famine of the early twenties seems to be a natural disaster- it would have been pretty terrible anyway, but perhaps not as bad as it turned out due to better conditions in Russia. The Stalinesque purges, Holodemor, etc, I would not really anticipate happening in the regime I have in mind, ie, a constitutional monarchy. All in all, we may be talking about having about thirty million people existing and reproducing that weren't there before.

I'm not touching World War II yet- it's reasonable to suppose it may be less, but it's hard to say for sure. The total losses of WWII, to have a nice round number, would be about 25 million.

Finally, I'm anticipating that a non-command economy might not incur the same problems with demographic stagnation as the Soviet Union did, so it's probable in my opinion that the population would not be shrinking, but quite possibly still growing, perhaps at a similar rate to the US. There's also the question of Jewish emigration to consider, which cost the territories of the former Soviet Union a good million or so in the Nineties.

Anyone want to take a crack at helping me a bit with this?
Top