Statiscal measurment in USSR

[Rooster]

I just read this in reference to the first five year plan:

"Most of the aims, of course, proved unattainable: even in heavy industry, to which the maximum human and financial effort was devoted, the results were sometimes half, a quarter, or an eighth of what they were supposed to be. The cure for this was to arrest and shoot statisticians and falsify their findings. In 1928-1930 Stalin closed down almost all economic and statistical journals, and most statistician of importance, including N.D. Kondratyev, were executed or thrown into gaol."

And

"It also became customary from this time on to calculate the national income in such a way as to count the same products two or three times, at different stages of manufacture, this producing meaningless totals"

This is from a book called Main Currents of Marxism by Leszek Kolakowski. No sources are mentioned for this part of the book. I was wondering if there were any concerning the stopping of statistical and economic journals. I would also appreciate if someone could tell me anything about Kondratyev (or even if they ever heard of him) and tell me if the second part is true in anyway or where this could have from.

[ComradeOm]

In 1928-1930 Stalin closed down almost all economic and statistical journals...This is true. TsSU (Central Statistical Administration) first got caught up in the intra-Party power struggle when Kamenev used its figures to support his position against Stalin in 1926. It's head (Popov) was driven out of office as a result. A year later the next head (Osinskii) was also forced to resign after his agency disagreed with the Stalinist assessment of the grain harvest. After further disagreements regarding the 1929 harvest, TsSU was wound up and incorporated into Gosplan in Jan 1930. Very little statistical work was published over the next two years

Thankfully it was reincarnated in Dec 1931 as TsUNKhU (Central Administration of National Economic Records) but Stalin again clamped down in 1932 and, while not disbanded, the statisticians lost any real political independence. There was a lot of valuable data gathered (unlike the period 1930-32) but the 'headline figures' are highly suspect and heavily distorted in order to suit the political agenda

There's a good essay in Davies's The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union called 'The Crooked Mirror of Soviet Economic Statistics' that covers a lot of this. Kondratyev I've never heard of though

[Ismail]

Similar things occurred in Albania in the 1970's when many economists were executed or arrested because of their rightist policies and their usage of statistics to advance anti-communist norms such as taking credits from the West and the East and subordinating the construction of heavy industry to light industry. For this reason many statistics were seen as unreliable in the West.

Statisticians and so on tended to coalesce around rightist forces in the USSR along with managers, so they were easy targets since they always favored "relaxing" the plans.