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Total populationUrban .Rural .1939170,500,00055,900,000(32 8 %)114,500,000(672 %)1926147,000,00026,300,000(17.9 %)120,700,000(82.1 %)Thus, while the rural population decreased by six millions,the urban more than doubled. There were in 1939eighty-one towns with over a hundred thousand inhabitants(compared with fifteen in the same area of theRussian empire forty years before), and these includednearly three-fifths of the urban population. 1 Some ofthe new up-growths were still only in the stage of campcities,and a very high proportion of those who wereclassed as urban were living under material and psychologicalconditions very different from the city populationsof the Western world. None the less the changes inconcentration and grouping that have occurred as aresult of the five-year plans have already made newpatterns in Soviet life, especially in the Volga-Urals regionand Soviet Asia, where the non-Russian peoples havebeen propelled with uprooting rapidity into a new era ofhistory. War with its all-devouring demands has cutacross these patterns, but in certain respects it has butgiven them fuller shape, notably as regards industrializationin Soviet Asia and the eastward trend of population.These last two demographic changes are largely aconsequence of the altered location of industry, whichhas been increasingly marked in the last ten years. Thevast sums expended by the government on geologicalresearch have been followed by the rapid developmentof,the very great mineral wealth of the Urals, the Altai,the Baikal region and Kazakhstan (see map 2). The Uralsand the Altai have returned, on a far larger scale, to theirearlier mining and industrial importance in Russianhistory. The Kuznetsk basin, the great new coal andiron centre in Central Siberia, was producing in 19297-5 per cent, of Union coal, in 1940 approximately 15 per1 A rather larger proportion than that in the United States, wherethere were (1940) ninety-two cities of 100,000 and over, compared with(1939) sixty-three in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and sixty-onein Germany (including Austria).386