Planned Economic Development and Loglinearity in the Rank-Size Distribution of Urban Systems: The Soviet Experience

In this paper, the city rank-size hypothesis is tested for the urban system of the USSR and the Republic of Ukraine using (1) census data for 1897,1926, 1939, 1959, 1970 and 1979, (2)subgrouping each census year in 3 categories: largest cities (rank 1-5), middle-sized cities (ranl 6-50) and smallest cities (rank higher than 50), in addition to the whole sample. Following the interpretation of the previous results, the relative changes in the ratios of the city distribution slope values from both systems are then observed and analysed for each of the specific group of cities.