Cooking the Soviet Books

Several U.S. and European experts on the Soviet economy see evidence that change-resistant bureaucrats are deliberately cooking the books in order to paint a rosier economic picture than the facts warrant. As the outside exerts see it, the phony numbers are being published not to mislead the West or even to make Mikhail S. Gorbachev look good, but as a stratagem to stave off the economic reforms sought by the Soviet leader.

Reliable statistics are essential to rational decision-making in any society, but they are especially important in planned, highly centralized communist economies.

Soviet statistical organizations are not above toying with the figures for political reasons; for example, statistics on life expectancy simply were not published for a few years because they made for embarrassing comparisons with the West. But, on the whole, Western experts through the years have found Soviet economic statistics to be basically accurate.

Recently, however, Soviet-watchers such as Ed Hewitt of the Brookings Institution, Philip Hanson of England’s University of Birmingham and Jan Vanous of Washington-based Planecon Inc. say that they have spotted some outright deceptions. Growth in national retail trade was officially reported to be 4.3% in 1985 and 6.4% last year, for example, while several Western experts who cross-checked the estimates with other data have concluded that the real figures were more like 1.6% in 1985 and 0.5% in 1986. Real growth in national income actually was only 0.8% in each of the last two years, rather than the 3%-plus figure reported by the Central Statistical Administration.

Western analysts do not believe that the distortions are part of a disinformation program aimed at the West. One explanation might be that the phony figures are inspired by Gorbachev and the Politburo to make their stewardship of the Soviet economy look good. But Vanous and Hewitt, among others, doubt it.

Instead, they believe that Gorbachev is actually the victim of the phony figures, that officials in the planning bureaucracy who oppose Gorbachev’s reforms are conspiring with senior party officials who also oppose the loosening of economic and ideological controls. As Hewitt told the Wall Street Journal, “Faking progress is another way of saying, ‘We’re doing OK, so let’s not change.”

If this analysis is correct, the fudging with statistics underscores the depth of the entrenched opposition to even the relatively modest reforms proposed by Gorbachev in his efforts to rejuvenate the Soviet economy. And economic statistics may well be an area in which the Soviet leader’s much vaunted program of glasnost , of greater openness and honesty of discussion, has not penetrated.