Keeper of Soviet state statistics who managed the planned economy's numbers as the younger brother of a revolutionary martyr
Reflecting on a lifetime as the Soviet Union's chief statistician in his English memoir Memory's Account (1983): "Numbers do not keep silent — we must simply be ready to hear them."
Head of the USSR Central Statistical Administration (TsSU, 1975–1985) who oversaw the statistical infrastructure of the Soviet planned economy through the late Brezhnev years and into the early Gorbachev period. A graduate of the Leningrad Engineering-Economics Institute, he built his career in Gosplan before spending three decades at TsSU, rising from deputy head to first deputy head and finally chief. His tenure coincided with mounting structural problems of systemic distortion and declining international credibility in Soviet statistics, which he publicly defended in works like Statistics Speaks (1982) and his English-language memoir Memory's Account (1983). He was the younger brother of V. Volodarsky, the Petrograd press commissar assassinated in 1918, and his career embodied the intersection of revolutionary heritage and Soviet technocracy.
Career Timeline
- 1926–29Komsomol executive secretary, 1st Soviet School, Leningrad
- 1934Graduates Leningrad Engineering-Economics Institute
- 1934–40Senior engineer-economist → head of planning, Leningrad local industry
- 1940–42Gosplan plenipotentiary for Leningrad and Leningrad Oblast
- 1942–48Deputy head → head of directorate, Gosplan USSR
- 1948–67Deputy head of TsSU (1948–53, 1956–67); chief editor, Gosstatizdat (1953–55); head of Industrial Statistics (1955–56)
- 1967–75First deputy head, TsSU under the USSR Council of Ministers
- 1975–85Head of TsSU USSR — Minister of the USSR