The economist who designed socialism in numbers
"Better to stand for high tempos than to sit for low ones" — Strumilin's famous riposte to the geneticists during the 1920s planning methodology debates.
Soviet economist and statistician who laid the intellectual foundations of the planned economy. He developed the world's first system of material balances, formulated the 'Strumilin index' for labor productivity, and pioneered the measurement of economic returns to education. Active in the revolutionary movement from 1897, he was a Menshevik through three arrests and exiles before joining the Bolshevik Party in 1923 and serving as deputy chairman of Gosplan. Elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences in 1931, he received the Lenin and Stalin Prizes and was named a Hero of Socialist Labor (1967).
Career Timeline
- 1896–1899Entered St. Petersburg Electrotechnical Institute; joined revolutionary movement
- 1899Joined RSDLP (Menshevik); expelled and conscripted after student strike
- 1906–1907Delegate to the 4th (Stockholm) and 5th (London) Congresses of the RSDLP
- 1914Graduated from Petrograd Polytechnical Institute, commercial department
- 1918–1923Head of statistics, People's Commissariat of Labor and AUCCTU
- 1921–1937Worked at Gosplan; deputy chairman and Presidium member (1930s)
- 1931Elected full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1942–1946Member, Academy commission on mobilizing resources for the war effort
- 1943–1951Member of the Council for Scientific-Technical Expertise of Gosplan
- 1947–1952Head of history of national economy sector, Institute of Economics
Related historical events
- 1921–1928The New Economic Policy (NEP)Gosplan economist who led planning and statistical work during the NEP period
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationPlanning economistA Gosplan economist who designed the growth targets of the Five-Year Plans in numbers.
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarGosplan economist, formulated plans for total economic mobilization
Teleological Planning and the Gosplan Debates of the 1920s
In the 1920s, a sharp debate over the methodology of national planning unfolded in the Soviet Union. Strumilin was the leading figure of the 'teleological' school in this controversy. The teleologists argued that planning must not merely extrapolate existing economic trends (the 'genetic' approach) but must start from socialist objectives and transform the very structure of the economy. The planner was not a passive reflector of market forces but an agent who consciously determined sectoral proportions and the direction of growth. On the other side stood the 'geneticists': Nikolai Kondratiev, Vladimir Groman, Vladimir Bazarov, who insisted that plans must proceed from the objective tendencies and equilibrium conditions of the market, and that arbitrary target-setting would produce imbalances. Strumilin's 1926 article 'On the Theory of Planning' (К теории планирования) was a key manifesto of the teleological position. This theoretical stance provided the methodological foundation for the world's first system of material balances, which Strumilin later led at Gosplan. Stalin's official adoption of the teleological approach in the 1930s made it the bedrock of the Soviet planned economy.