The man who ran Soviet statistics for 35 years
"We have no other figures. Comrade Starovsky is a very cautious man. I take my figures from him. This is our all-Union bookkeeping. I trust him." — Khrushchev, CPSU Presidium, 19 August 1964.
Headed the Central Statistical Administration (TsSU) of the USSR from 1940 to 1975, overseeing all Soviet state statistics for 35 years, the longest tenure of any statistical chief. Beginning with the 1939 census, he managed every postwar Soviet population and economic census, producing the foundational data on which Gosplan built the national economic plans. A Doctor of Economics and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, he laid the methodological groundwork for Soviet mathematical statistics and was the only statistical authority Khrushchev ever publicly declared he trusted. Yet in the 1960s he played a decisive role in blocking Glushkov's OGAS computer-network project, defending the existing punched-card system, a controversial turning point in Soviet information-technology history.
Career Timeline
- 1919–1923Clerk and statistician, Ust-Sysolsk District Statistical Bureau
- 1924–1926Statistician, VSNKh USSR; graduated Faculty of Soviet Law, Moscow State University
- 1926–1930Statistician and researcher, TsSU USSR; postgraduate studies, RANION Institute of Economics
- 1931–1937Researcher, deputy head of personnel, TsUNKhU, Gosplan USSR
- 1937–1939Deputy head, All-Union Census Bureau, TsUNKhU
- 1940–1941Head of TsUNKhU, Gosplan USSR
- 1941–1948Head of TsSU, Gosplan USSR — Deputy Chairman of Gosplan
- 1948–1975Head of TsSU under USSR Council of Ministers (ministerial rank from 1957)