Soviet Accounting Students Turn to American Textbook

Across the Soviet Union this summer, university professors are shelving Marx and picking up Needles. Belverd E. Needles Jr., that is.

With the flight from communism, Soviet professors are finding that they’re suddenly having to learn the same concepts that American business students struggle with in school.

How do you keep track of a company’s liabilities and assets? How do you calculate business income? What’s the meaning of “owner’s equity”?

Enter Needles with his 1,300-page “Principles of Accounting,” a tome that gives sore eyes to beginning business and accounting students at more than 500 colleges and universities in the United States.

The book has been selected by a U.N. agency for translation into Russian and use at the university level throughout the Soviet Union. Only one beginning general accounting book has been selected because the translating task is so huge.

“We talked with German, French and English authorities, and they all agreed that the Needles book is the best teaching text,” said Lorraine Ruffing, chief of accounting and statistics at the U.N. Center for Transnational Corporations.

Needles, a professor at DePaul University in Chicago, is expected go to the Soviet Union this fall to give crash courses to graduating seniors who need at least some familiarity with Western methods.

“We’re talking about mass education,” said Needles, who is 48. “There has been very little familiarity with our accounting methods at their universities. For many of the accounting terms, there are no Soviet words.

“Capital, owner’s equity, return on assets--there’s no measure for those kinds of things in a socialist economy.”

Western executives involved with Soviet ventures have complained for years that they don’t understand Soviet accounting.

A team of Soviet professors has been working for several months on the Russian translation of Needles’ book.