Construire le socialisme par les chiffres

Abstract

What is the relationship between the Soviet power system and the use of statistical tools in the USSR? Is there anything particular about social surveys and population censuses in socialist countries? From the moment of the October Revolution, statistical tools became instrumental in the construction of socialism.

The situation was unprecedented, with a new type of state, a new socioeconomic model and a new method of data production. Figures - both financial and statistical - became political instruments, intended to serve the new state as scientific and numerical proof of its legitimacy and of the validity of its political action. From this point of view, the massive use of quantification as a tool of government in the USSR offers a particularly interesting case study.

Although the new Bolshevik government inherited the statistical structures created under Tsarist rule - the zemstvo statistical offices - headed by statisticians who saw their discipline as a science, the work of these structures and their mode of operation led to rapidly growing tensions from the 1920s onward.

The statisticians advocated a scientific approach to data production, while the political leaders saw statistics as a tool to serve the socialist state, Soviet economic planning and the construction of a classless society.

The history of socialist statistics is a chronicle of the efforts made by statisticians to adapt to this new situation and to the powerful system of economic planning. The scale of the debate and the changes that ensued until the end of the Soviet era raise the question of the true content of a system presented as a radically new approach to the quantification of activity and of economic and social phenomena.

Studying these disputes and controversies sheds light on the place of the intellectual and scientific professions in socialist Russia and, in particular, on the way in which political leaders pictured society and howit should be governed.