Statistics and the State in USSR - Alain Blum

Historian Alain Blum on statistics as a tool of government and propaganda, the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, and unresolved social problems

[Tineard]

Well, here we go again.. those "scientists" who speak about USSR either don't know first thing about it, or deliberately skip great chunks of info. True, our government in 1960+ tried to only show good tihngs and silence bad things - there was censorship and it was bad thing, because people knew that not everything is good everywhere, so they assumed that we were constantly lied to, which was only half true, and that partially led to breaking the USSR. But what i didn't hear is why we had such a big network in a first place, and ofc part about Stalin who didn't listen to his statisticians is plain ridiculous, it was possible that he showed to society better numbers than actual ones (altho i can't say if that happened, but i don't know, so can't argue), but he was not insane lunatic to kill people who brought bad news, seriously.. And back to why our country has wast statistic system - because bolsheviks actually wanted to make country with a plan, not randomly and they needed all the info they coul get - not like whole world lives today, when polititians and economist live from election to election.