The 1937 Soviet Census

In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin declared war on statistical reality, launching a brutal crackdown on the Tsentral’noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie—the Central Statistical Administration. If the data suggested unwelcome news—famines, plummeting grain yields, industrial failures—Stalin blamed the statisticians for “wrecking,” “sabotage,” or “bourgeois pessimism.” Valerian Osinsky, for example, head of the Central Statistical Directorate, was fired for reporting low crop yields that contradicted the projections in the Five-Year Plan.¹