1937–
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.'
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
1973-1987: The undeclared war on the statistics
His 1968 candidate dissertation at Novosibirsk State University, on the planned socialist economy, was not confirmed by the Higher Attestation Commission, and he was dismissed from the university in 1972. He took a second degree in 1973 at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations with a study of stock exchanges, undertaken to understand how capital markets worked, but by then he had already begun recalculating the real growth rates of the Soviet economy. Reconstructing growth from 1955 onward, he concluded that rates had fallen continuously since the late 1950s, that the eighth five-year plan (1966-1970) was no exception, and that the exhaustion of extensive factors would bring stagnation by the mid-1980s. These unpublished calculations were first presented to fellow economists in the summer of 1976 at the Central Economic-Mathematical Institute's annual conference in Zvenigorod. He then built several methods for measuring the real growth of industrial output, national income, fixed assets and material intensity, producing a 250-page body of calculations, parts of which appeared in camouflaged form in journals in 1982-1985. In the same years he wrote to Brezhnev and to the State Planning Committee warning of approaching stagnation and urging greater enterprise autonomy; he received no reply. In the spring of 1986 a scheduled doctoral defence collapsed, he lost his research post, could not find work in his field, and taught geography in a secondary school in a neighbouring town for six months. 'The Crooked Figure', published in Novy Mir in February 1987, was the product of those years. That spring the Central Statistical Administration called the article slanderous and rebutted it, and only after his 1988 Kommunist article, tables included, did the criticism stop.