Strumilin, Stanislav Gustavovich

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STRUMILIN, STANISLAV GUSTAVOVICH

(1877–1974), economist, statistician, and demographer.

Stanislav Gustavovich Strumilo-Petrashkevich was a Social Democrat (Menshevik) before 1917. Involved in revolutionary activities, he was arrested several times.

In the Soviet period, Strumilin held various high positions in the State Planning Board Gosplan (deputy chairman several times, chairman of the economic-statistical section during the 1920s) and in the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1931 full membership and doctor of economics honoris causa). For decades he also worked as a professor.

Strumilin published on economic planning, the economics of labor, industrial statistics, and economic history, and he took sides in all important economic debates. He combined theoretical argumentation with empirical statistics and also incorporated sociological perspectives (e.g., in his pioneering time-budget studies). During the politicized economic debates of the 1920s, he was a radical advocate of a planned economy and responsible for the drawing up of the First Five-Year-Plan. He opted for the teleological method of planning, which takes the final (production) targets as a starting point. His demographic works, among them a prediction regarding the number and age–sex composition of the population of Russia for 1921–1941, were influential in the Soviet Union and gained international attention.

Strumilin managed to survive the purges of the Josef Stalin period and benefited from the rehabilitation of the economists after World War II. He then concentrated on labor issues and the impact of education on wage differentials, participated actively in the economic debates of the 1950s and 1960s, and published until 1973. He represented the first generation of Soviet Marxist economists.

See also: five-year plans; gosplan; mensheviks