1929–2018
Died
A scholar who quantified the Soviet economy's hidden flows
Even when official sales fell, samogon continued to be consumed outside the statistics.
Vladimir Treml was an American economist who used indirect indicators to estimate income and consumption missing from official Soviet statistics. He analyzed actual alcohol consumption, including samogon, and vodka's share of state budget revenue, showing why retail-sales figures understated drinking in Soviet society. His 1982 book Alcohol in the USSR: A Statistical Study brought this work together and was kept in restricted library collections in the Soviet Union.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1960sResearched the Soviet economy and unofficial income
- 1970sEstimated the Soviet informal economy and consumption
- 1977Contributed to research on the Soviet second economy
- 1982Published Alcohol in the USSR: A Statistical Study
- 1987Published research on drinking and alcohol abuse in the USSR
- 1989With Michael Alexeev, studied the destabilizing second economy of the USSR
Related historical events
Research on the Soviet Second Economy and the Berkeley-Duke Survey
Treml co-edited the Berkeley-Duke Occasional Papers on the Second Economy in the USSR with Gregory Grossman. Between 1985 and 1993, 26 authors contributed 51 papers to the series. Treml’s work formed part of an effort to quantify activity outside official statistics using household surveys and statistical data. The Berkeley-Duke survey questioned 1,061 households, comprising 3,023 people, who had left the Soviet Union and settled in the United States between 1971 and 1982. It asked about household composition, occupations, income and expenditure, savings, alcohol consumption, and car ownership. Because the survey relied on emigrants’ retrospective accounts, it had limits as a representative sample, but it provided material for estimating private and informal activities that official statistics did not capture.
Treml’s 1985 study analyzed the second economy in alcohol, including illegal production and distribution. Activities included home-distilled samogon and homemade grape or fruit wine and beer, private resale of state-produced beverages, and theft of ethanol from state enterprises. He estimated that these illegal alcohol activities generated net private revenues of 14 billion rubles in 1979, equivalent to 2.2 percent of adjusted GDP and 5 percent of consumption. He also examined the use of legal and illegal vodka as a commodity currency in second-economy markets and illegal transactions.