U.S. Accounting Book Will Aid Soviets’ Class Struggle

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 they are 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?”

This is where Needles comes in with his weighty 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 United Nations 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.

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,” the 48-year-old Needles said. “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.”

A team of Soviet professors has been working for several months on the Russian translation of Needles’ book, and completion is scheduled for this fall.

Meanwhile, English-language versions of the book are being used at six Soviet universities, where business and accounting professors from across the country have gathered this summer for beginning lessons in Western accounting procedures.