Stanislav Gustavovich Strumilin

Who he is and his times

Stanislav Gustavovich Strumilin (born Strumillo-Petrashkevich) was born in 1877 in Podolia Governorate and lived for almost a hundred years, dying in 1974. He studied at the St Petersburg Electrotechnical Institute, was expelled for taking part in student unrest, was arrested several times and twice escaped from exile. According to Wikipedia, from 1899 to 1920 he was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and sided with the Mensheviks, and he joined the Bolshevik party in 1923. He completed his economic education in 1914 in the economics department of the St Petersburg Polytechnic Institute.

After the revolution Strumilin worked on labour statistics at the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) and in Petrograd, and from 1921 he worked at Gosplan. According to Wikipedia, from 7 August 1928 to 8 December 1930 he was deputy chairman of the USSR Gosplan; he remained at Gosplan until 1937 and returned there in 1943–1951. In 1931 he was elected a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1958 he received the Lenin Prize for a work on the history of ferrous metallurgy, and in 1967 the title of Hero of Socialist Labour.

His path into the planning bodies lay through labour statistics. According to recollections recorded by M. Shaginyan, after the October Revolution Strumilin organized the statistics department at VSNKh, and from 1919 he took up labour statistics as an independent field of research. By 1922 he was already a member of the Gosplan presidium. This biography explains a great deal: for Strumilin the plan was from the outset linked to measuring living labour — how many people, of what qualification and for how many hours they work — and not only to tonnes and roubles.

Strumilin’s biography is unusual for his generation of economists. A former Menshevik, he ended up on the side of the victorious line and survived the repressions that destroyed most of his opponents from the debates of the 1920s. According to Wikipedia, in 1937–1938 he was accused in the party press of adherence to “opportunist theories”, but he was not arrested. The scale of his legacy is enormous: according to the Great Russian Encyclopedia, more than 700 scholarly works.

Main ideas

Strumilin’s central idea is that a plan is not a forecast but a programme of action. Whereas the “geneticists” held that the planner must first identify objective trends and only then cautiously correct them, the “teleologists” proceeded from the goal: society decides what it wants to achieve, and the planning bodies select the means. The term “teleological” itself — from the Greek word for “goal” — was introduced into the planning literature by Strumilin’s opponent V. A. Bazarov.

Strumilin gave the sharpest formulation of this position in his dispute with Kondratiev in 1927. Responding to the call to limit the plan to what is “realistically achievable”, he wrote that “we will never give up our goals” merely because their achievement is not guaranteed, and that the will of the proletariat, concentrated in the plan, can itself become the decisive chance of success. For him the plan was an instrument of mobilization and not only of calculation: a bold goal, in his view, itself changes the conditions under which it is achieved.

Yet Strumilin was no opponent of calculation — on the contrary, he was one of the strongest statisticians of his time. He is regarded as one of the originators of the balance method in planning, that is, bringing resources and requirements together in tables where the production of each product is balanced against its distribution. He developed an index of labour productivity that was later named after him. In the book Problems of Labour Economics (1925) and in subsequent works Strumilin developed a methodology for the balance of labour resources and for population forecasts. According to the Great Russian Encyclopedia, it is he who is considered the founder of labour economics in the country. The idea was to plan not only production but also people: how many workers the sectors would need, where to find them, how their qualifications would change. For an industrialization that was moving millions of peasants into the cities, this was a question of paramount importance.

His time-budget research occupies a special place. In 1922–1923, under his direction, what are generally regarded as the world’s first large-scale surveys were conducted of how workers and peasants divide the day between work, sleep, meals, domestic labour and leisure. The results were published in 1924 in the book The Time Budget of the Russian Worker and Peasant in 1922–1923. It was a way of measuring real life rather than reports about it.

Another well-known line of work is the calculation of the economic efficiency of education. By his estimates, a year of schooling raised a worker’s qualification more than a year of factory experience — by a factor of 2.6, as E. I. Kapustin recounts. According to the Great Russian Encyclopedia, Strumilin calculated that the gain from higher productivity exceeded the state’s spending on education roughly 25 times. These works of the 1920s were later regarded as a precursor of human capital theory.

What became of the ideas in practice

Strumilin led the drafting of the five-year plan at Gosplan from 1926; according to researchers, in 1926–1927 he prepared the first three variants. The results of the work were published in 1927. A curious detail: according to the historian D. Khmelnitsky, in the first variant of the five-year plan the annual growth rate of industrial output declined from 16.3 % to 10 %, that is, the “teleologist” himself at first built in the very damping curve he later opposed.

Under political pressure the variants became ever more strained. According to the same study, in the December 1928 variant growth rates no longer declined but held at about 22–25 % a year. In May 1929 the Fifth All-Union Congress of Soviets approved the optimal variant, whose targets were about 20 % higher than the starting one. At that time Strumilin was deputy chairman of Gosplan and one of the main defenders of high growth rates.

Strumilin did not work in a vacuum: in parallel with Gosplan, the Supreme Council of the National Economy was preparing its own five-year plan for industry, where, according to Khmelnitsky, this work was headed by A. M. Ginzburg. The two agencies competed with their variants, and the political leadership time and again chose the higher figures. This competition was not a contest of calculations: the variant that won was the one that better matched the leadership’s expectations. Later, in 1931, Ginzburg became one of the defendants at the Menshevik Union Bureau trial.

At the same time the opponents were being eliminated. In 1930 Kondratiev, Groman, Bazarov and many other economists of the “genetic” school were arrested; the dispute about method became a criminal case. In December 1930 Strumilin was relieved of the post of deputy chairman, but he remained at Gosplan and in academic life. Later, in 1932–1934, according to Wikipedia, he was deputy head of the Central Administration of National Economic Accounting.

The balance method, which Strumilin helped to develop, became the basis of Soviet planning for decades. In Stalinist practice, however, it turned into the method of material balances, in which physical volumes were coordinated across hundreds and then thousands of items. The site already cites an estimate: in 1973 the balances covered 1,943 items and about 70 % of industrial output. The gap between a plan item and a specific product was closed by tolkachi (expediters) and informal exchange.

What worked and what did not

Strumilin’s statistical tools undoubtedly worked. The time-budget surveys became a model for subsequent research both in the USSR and abroad; the method is still used in social statistics today. His calculations of the return on education were several decades ahead of the Western literature. Labour-resource balances and the productivity index became part of the standard toolkit of Soviet labour economics.

The fate of the open social statistics of the 1920s is also telling. Books such as Workers’ Everyday Life in Figures (1926) published detailed data on the incomes, expenditures and time of working-class families, and any reader could check them. In the 1930s a large part of such statistics was classified or ceased to be published, and information that contradicted official successes became dangerous for the statisticians themselves. The tools Strumilin created outlived the era, but the conditions for their honest use did not.

The very idea that a plan can set goals and not merely extend trends also worked. The industrialization of the 1930s did create heavy industry in a very short time, and this could not have been obtained by extrapolating pre-war proportions. Strumilin’s supporters still point to this as proof that the teleologists were right.

What did not work was the combination “the goal is set by will, feasibility need not be checked”. The first five-year plan was not fulfilled on many physical indicators, although it was officially declared fulfilled ahead of schedule; in 1987 the journal Kommunist wrote about this directly. In 1927 Kondratiev predicted a food shortage by the end of the five-year plan — and the mass famine of 1932–1933, caused primarily by collectivization and grain procurements, showed the price of forcing the pace.

Nor did the balance method work at the scale of the whole economy. Material balances coordinated large aggregates well, but could not take account of assortment, quality and local conditions. Prices played an auxiliary role in them, so planning errors did not show up as losses and gave no signal for correction. Later attempts were made to solve this problem with Kantorovich’s shadow prices and with the input-output balance, towards which Strumilin himself, according to V. A. Pchelkin, was neutral.

Debate and criticism

The dispute between the “geneticists” and the “teleologists” in 1926–1928 was the central methodological debate of Soviet planning. The geneticists — Kondratiev, Bazarov, Groman, Ginzburg — argued that the plan must proceed from objective regularities, from equilibrium between industry and agriculture, accumulation and consumption. The teleologists — Strumilin, Krzhizhanovsky and others — believed that a socialist economy can and must subordinate trends to goals. According to V. A. Pchelkin, the geneticists were also in favour of the plan, but under conditions of a market economy.

Critics reproached Strumilin for voluntarism: a goal not checked against resources becomes a wish, and the plan becomes an instrument of pressure. Kondratiev wrote about “statistical fetishism” and argued that reality would in any case force the prospects to be reduced to what is realistically achievable, only at the cost of a heavy reckoning. On this point history rather vindicated the critics: the forced plans were accompanied by imbalances, a food crisis and a fall in living standards in the early 1930s.

The tone of the polemic quickly ceased to be academic. Replying to Kondratiev in 1927, Strumilin called him an “epigone of Narodism”, and in the same year G. E. Zinoviev declared Kondratiev’s views a manifesto of the “kulak party” in the journal Bolshevik. Ideological labels replaced the analysis of calculations: the question of whether the country had enough grain, metal and labour for the set growth rates turned into a question of the author’s political loyalty. Three years later these labels became part of indictments.

Strumilin’s supporters reply that the genetic approach would have preserved an agrarian country, and that the pre-war structure of the economy could not be a model for the future. Academician A. N. Efimov, as Pchelkin recounts, believed that the two concepts are not so incompatible: goal-setting and the identification of trends are different stages of a single piece of work. Bazarov himself wrote roughly the same: teleology and genetics are not antagonists but interconnected moments.

A separate theme is a moral one. The dispute ended not with a scholarly resolution but with the arrest of one side. Strumilin survived that era and continued working; his opponents did not. An honest assessment of his legacy must separate his scholarly contribution, which is beyond doubt, from his role in a debate where his position coincided with a political line that ended in repressions against his colleagues. The sources reviewed contain no documentary evidence of his direct participation in the persecutions.

Legacy today

Today Strumilin is remembered primarily as a statistician. Time-budget surveys are conducted by the statistical services of many countries, and the Soviet surveys of 1922–1923 are usually named among the first. His calculations of the efficiency of education are cited in the history of human capital economics. The Strumilin index and labour-resource balances remain part of the history of economic statistics.

Few defend the teleological approach in its pure form today, but the question itself — “who sets the goals, and how far can a goal outrun the trend?” — has not gone away. Every development strategy, national project or climate programme solves this problem anew. The difference from the 1920s is that today there are tools of scenario analysis, open data and independent verification that make it possible to set ambitious goals without giving up the calculation of feasibility.

In the last decades of his life Strumilin wrote a great deal about the future communist society, about property and about distribution. In 1961, according to M. Shaginyan, he was preparing for publication works on the problems of socialism and communism and on the fate of property in the USSR. Today these texts read more as a monument of their era than as a scholarly programme, but they show the author’s constant trait: the desire to translate great social goals into measurable quantities of time, labour and consumption.

For the Open Planning project, Strumilin is interesting for two opposite reasons. On the one hand, he showed that it is possible to measure what had previously been considered unmeasurable — people’s time, the return on education, productivity. On the other hand, his story shows what happens when goals are set by planners and the political leadership and measurement is subordinated to proving success: statistics turns from verification into propaganda.

Links between ideas

Whom the author argued with, whose ideas they developed, whom they answered and whose fate they shared. All links are on the shared graph. Graph of ideas

• Gleb Krzhizhanovsky

  Practice and institutions ←

  Both stood at Gosplan’s teleological pole: Krzhizhanovsky headed it, Strumilin drafted the first variants of the five-year plan.

• Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman

  Debate and criticism ←

  Geneticists versus teleologists: build the plan from trends and proportions, or from goals that themselves change conditions.

• Nikolai Kondratiev

  Direct response ←

  Strumilin answered Kondratiev’s 1927 “Critical Notes” by saying that goals are not abandoned even when success is not guaranteed.

• Nikolai Voznesensky

  Practice and institutions →

  Strumilin returned to Gosplan in 1943–1951, during Voznesensky’s chairmanship.

• Leonid Kantorovich

  Debate and criticism →

  A 1964 letter by Strumilin and Ostrovityanov in Pravda declared Kantorovich’s book contrary to the labour theory of value.

Timeline

1. 1877

   Born in Podolia Governorate

2. 1914

   Graduates from the economics department of the St Petersburg Polytechnic Institute

3. 1921

   Begins work at Gosplan

4. 1922–1923

   Leads the first large-scale time-budget surveys of workers and peasants

5. 1926–1927

   Leads the drafting of the first variants of the five-year plan at Gosplan

6. 1927

   Polemic with Kondratiev on the realism of plan targets

7. 1928

   Appointed deputy chairman of the USSR Gosplan (7 August)

8. 1930

   Relieved of the post of deputy chairman (8 December)

9. 1931

   Elected a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences

10. 1958

    Lenin Prize

Key works

• 1905Wealth and Labour (Bogatstvo i trud)
• 1924The Time Budget of the Russian Worker and Peasant in 1922–1923: Statistical and Economic Essays (Byudzhet vremeni russkogo rabochego i krest’yanina v 1922–1923 godu. Statistiko-ekonomicheskie ocherki)
• 1925Problems of Labour Economics (Problemy ekonomiki truda)
• 1926Workers’ Everyday Life in Figures (Rabochiy byt v tsifrakh)
• 1928Essays on the Soviet Economy (Ocherki sovetskoy ekonomiki)
• 1944The Industrial Revolution in Russia (Promyshlennyy perevorot v Rossii)
• 1958On the Planning Front, 1920–1930 (Na planovom fronte. 1920–1930 gg.)

Sources

1. Большая российская энциклопедия. Струмилин Станислав Густавович. 2004–2017
2. Е. И. Капустин (Экономическая наука современной России, № 3). Теоретик и практик народнохозяйственного планирования. К 125-летию со дня рождения академика С. Г. Струмилина. 2003
3. В. В. Симонов, Н. К. Фигуровская (Вестник Академии наук СССР, № 4). Экономика здравого смысла. Штрихи к портрету Н. Д. Кондратьева. 1991
4. В. А. Пчелкин (Экономические стратегии, № 5). Академик А. Н. Ефимов, дебаты 1920-х годов и некоторые проблемы современности. 2018
5. С. Г. Струмилин. Бюджет времени русского рабочего и крестьянина в 1922–1923 году. 1924
6. Д. Хмельницкий (Гефтер). Сказки для Сталина. Как сочинялся генеральный план реконструкции народного хозяйства. 2018
7. М. Шагинян (Наука и жизнь, № 8). Академик С. Г. Струмилин. 1961
8. Википедия. Струмилин, Станислав Густавович. 2026
9. Википедия. Первая пятилетка. 2026

Prepared from open sources. Dates, titles and quotations were checked against the source list at the bottom of the page; where sources disagree, the text says so.