Like No Other

Industrial Giant

In the early 1990s, the world witnessed the dissolution of a political and industrial empire. In the production of many min­eral and agricultural resources, it was among the world’s lead­ers. Though marked by a uniformity of design, Soviet manufac­turing continuously revealed impressive statistics of volume production. This demanded concentrated labor and equipment, concentrated into big cities. In this respect, the Soviet Union was no different from the United States, Europe, or Japan.

Urban Concentrations

By 1990, the U. S.S. R. had 52 cities with more than half a mil­lion inhabitants each. About half of these had populations of more than a million. Leningrad had five million, and Moscow’s eleven ranked it among the top half dozen conurba­tions in the world. Thirty of the 52 are in Russia, a reminder that the new regime is still a powerful force in the industrial world. Nine are in Ukraine, which, of the breakaway republics, alone has a balanced economy of world stature.

Of great significance to Aeroflot is the geographi­cal distribution of the urban concentrations. Of the 52 big cities, only 15 are more than 2,000km (l,250mi) and only three are more than 4,000km (2,500mi) from Moscow.

The domestic market for a long-range Ilyushin 11-86 is thus very small.

Conversely, only three major cities are within 400km (250mi) of Moscow, and only Gorki (Nizhni Novgorod) has more than one million people. It was the destination for Dobrolet’s first service in 1923, but is hardly a natu­ral air route in the jet age.

St Petersburg (Leningrad), is connected to Moscow by a good railway service, with future high-speed rail potential.