Statistics in the Soviet Epoch / Statistics in the Soviet Epoch

Summary This paper is based on a large number of Soviet and western sources and describes the development of statistics in the Soviet Union. After ca. 1922, Russian statisticians were able to work successfully drawing on the contemporaneous national and foreign professional knowledge. From 1927 onward, however, many of them were labelled saboteurs or enemies of the people, arrested and even shot. Pre-Soviet statistics was denied, and its classics were called ideologists of the bourgeoisie (Siissmilch, Quetelet) or enemies of materialism (Pearson). The new crop of Soviet statisticians, largely composed of ignoramuses, restricted the aims of statistics to confirming Marxist political economy. In the post-war period, ideology continued to dominate over statistics, econometrics had to overcome great ideological resistance, and genetics, crushed in 1948, in particular because of its ties with statistics, did not return to life until the 1960’s.