Nizhny Novgorod — 1,271,045 officially registered residents. The actual figure is probably closer to 1.5 million.
Interesting Facts
- According to the Cadastral Book of 1621, Nizhny Novgorod had 15,000 inhabitants and 2,364 residential households and izbas. This figure includes the residents of the trans-river Kunavinskaya Sloboda, who "share the tax burden with the Nizhny Novgorod residents in small measure." "In total, in the stone city and in the Upper and Lower posads — boyars and chancery men, Nizhny Novgorod and out-of-town noblemen and boyar sons, monastery servants and clerks, foreigners, Nizhny Novgorod fifties-commanders, tens-commanders, rank-and-file streltsy, gunners, wall-gunners, and other non-taxable people — 695 households, yard-keepers, and izbas. In the posad, taxable people of the best, middling, lesser, and poor sort, together with those living on the land of the Annunciation Monastery yet paying taxes and all dues alongside the posad people — 862 households. In the Lower Posad, the rows: the Great, the Cobbler's and Sole-maker's, the Karelian, the Potter's, the Grain, the Onion, the Dye-goods, the Salt, the Groats, the Butcher's, the Icon, the Fish and New Fish, the Linen and Rag, the Women's, the Kalach-bread, the Bread, the Tray-vendor's… In the Upper and Lower Posads, 77 storehouses and small storehouses, and 252 shops with a half-shop. In the Lower Posad as well, 13 eating-house izbas. In the Upper Posad, beyond the Dmitrovsky Gates and on Ilyinskaya Hill — 38 smithies and seven smithy plots."
- As of 1897, Nizhny Novgorod was the seventh most populous city in Russia, behind Moscow, St. Petersburg, Saratov, Kazan, Rostov-on-Don, Tula, and Astrakhan.
- According to the first General Census of the Russian Empire, 90,000 people lived here, and by the first All-Union Census of 1926 the number had already reached 222,000. In other words, over 276 years the population of Nizhny Novgorod grew sixfold, while in the 29 years straddling the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries it grew 2.5 times.
- According to the 1989 census, Nizhny Novgorod was the third largest city in Russia, with a population of 1,403,000.
- The population decline is due primarily to natural decrease (deaths exceeding births), which has been observed in Nizhny Novgorod Region since the early 1990s.
- The growth of Kazan's population is largely the result of the administrative annexation of surrounding settlements. See here and here.