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>The new Soviet Census (1939) showed a population figure of 170.6 million people, manipulated so as to match exactly the numbers stated by Stalin in his report to the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/researcher-questions-chi...

Lots of sources question population data as well as all other officials statistics. Nobody care. It is not just numbers, it is political statements.

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fun fact: if the Habsburgers - during the Thirty Years' War - would have known that the Swedish Kingdom only had around a million citizens at this time they could have marched on straight to Stockholm and called it a day.

But population numbers were highly confidential in those days and since Sweden was vast to the north they wrongly assumed it was populated much more densely.

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