The economist who exposed Soviet growth statistics as an 84-fold exaggeration and recalculated the real record
"The resulting economic mechanism combined all the worst features of both command and market economies": his verdict on the 1965 reform.
He was an economist who began recalculating Soviet official statistics using independent methods in the 1970s, arriving at the explosive finding that national income had grown not by the official 84.4 times but by only 6.6 times between 1928 and 1985. His 1987 article 'The Crooked Figure,' co-authored with Vasily Selyunin in Novy Mir, caused a sensation across Soviet society. He went on to write a multi-volume Economic History of Russia in the Modern Era, offering a dispassionate analysis of the achievements and failures of the Soviet planned economy; of the 1965 Kosygin reform he delivered the verdict that it 'combined all the worst features of both command and market economies.'
Career Timeline
- 1959Graduated from Leningrad Institute of Finance and Economics
- 1959–1962Economist at industrial enterprises, Riga
- 1965–1973Lecturer, Novosibirsk State University
- 1979–1986Lecturer, Institute for Advanced Training, Iskitim
- 1986–1991Head of Economic Laboratory, Tuva Complex Department, Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1992Doctor of Economics, Central Economic-Mathematical Institute
- 1995–현재Professor, Novosibirsk State Technical University
- 2003–2011Published Economic History of Russia in the Modern Era, vols. 1–3