¹Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, UK. E-mail: R.W.DAVIES@bham.ac.uk

¹The author is grateful to Professor M. Harrison for assistance, and to Drs A. Miniuk (Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE)), A. Blum, S. Tsakunov, and S.G. Wheatcroft for valuable assistance in seeking out material in the Russian archives. Research for this article was supported by the British Economic and Social Research Council, grant no. R 000 23 9543. A shorter version was published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, February 2004, 86(1): 429–432.

Abstract

Over 50 years ago, Abram Bergson, Janet Chapman and others sought to assess the large gap in Soviet statistics between the published wage bill and the full wage bill, and Frank Lorimer drew attention to the related gap between the employment data in the 1939 population census and in the annual employment returns. Soviet archives, which have recently been declassified, show the way in which Soviet Moscow and local statisticians handled this problem, and reveal the considerable extent to which the findings of the Western authors were accurate.