Statistics as an Instrument of Policy Making in the USSR

Discussed are cases of manipulation & censorship of statistical data by Joseph Stalin, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, & Leonid Il'ich Brezhnev for the purposes of political propaganda or cover-up. Population numbers published in the Pravda in the 1930s & 1940s are compared with real numbers preserved in archival materials to show how Stalin tried to mislead national & foreign audiences about the real demographic impact on the population numbers of the USSR by his forced collectivization policy, the persecution of the so-called "enemies of socialism" during the 1937-1939 period, losses to civilian population during WWII, & the post-WWII hunger & new wave of repressions. Khrushchev & Brezhnev followed Stalin's example & personally intervened to distort statistics indicating the lowering life expectancy & increasing infant mortality rates in the USSR. Information about the number of citizens in the armed forces & support services, residing in towns with military industry or sites deemed important to national security, prison population, victims of natural disasters & epidemic diseases, & other politically sensitive populace was habitually either censored or falsified. The ethnic composition of Kazakhstan in the 1939 census was changed (making Russians prevail numerically over Kazakhs) for political purposes. 7 Tables, 64 References. Z. Dubiel