3 - Measuring Soviet GNP

Summary

The Bergson school

Western distrust of Soviet official statistics became widespread in the 1930s; the first serious independent reevaluation of Soviet growth was published in 1939 by Colin Clark. These concerns did not have much practical importance until World War II, when western evaluations of Soviet economic strength suddenly acquired major policy implications. And of course this motivation gathered force in the formative years of the Cold War when US–Soviet rivalry became entrenched. After World War II a number of individual scholars made major contributions to western reevalution of the Soviet national income and product. First among them was Naum Jasny (two other notable early studies limited to industrial production were by Donald R. Hodgman and G. Warren Nutter).

Pride of place, however, in terms of the scale of the research effort, the quantity and quality of research output, and its historical legacy, belongs to Abram Bergson and the team which he assembled in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Abram Bergson began work on the reevaluation of Soviet national income in the US Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) during World War II, and continued after the war at Columbia University in New York City. At this time he was approached by the RAND Corporation of the United States Air Force to extend his work, which became known as the SNIP (Soviet national income and product) project.