Many, many observers have noted over the last five decades that the visible infrastructure simply did not match the population claims ~ whether nationally, or locally.
With greater transparancy in their systems, the Russians will need to get their official population count down to the reality which is probably nearer 100 million than not.
Good point. The statistics of Communist states generally aren't worth the low-grade paper they're printed on. Your observation reminds me of Pierre Chaunu,a French demographer who wrote in the 1970s that many African states inflated their populations in order to get more foreign aid (which the leaders then stole). Chaunu also thought that Chinese population figures were exaggerated, noting that the population of China under Chiang Kai-shek in the 1930s was estimated at about 300 million, but Mao's state then claimed a billion people in the 1950s.