Documents / FOIA release
This Joint Committee Print, dated December 8, 1982, gathers studies that the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Intelligence prepared for the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress. It gives estimates of Soviet gross national product for 1950 to 1980, with indexes of industrial production, agricultural production and consumption, and explains the methods and data behind them. The foreword says official Soviet statistics inflate growth and that the CIA measures offer a more accurate picture. The document contains no UFO material.
“Gross”60+ pages
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421 Western scholars generally agree, however, that inac- curacy varies widely over time and affects some statistical series more than others. Political pressure in the Stalin and Khrushchev eras led to falsification of output data. The expansion and improvement in the statistical reporting system that began in the early 1960s may have resulted in more accurate data in recent years. Even today, however, data for politically sensitive commodities such as grain are subject to more manipulation than data for less sensitive pro- ducts. The prevailing Western opinion still is that reasonably accurate results are obtained using Soviet agricultural statistics if necessary adjustments and cross-checks of the data are made and if the supplied definitions are carefully read.” Soviet writers often paint a more dismal picture of the reliability of their official statistics. Khrushchev stat- ed that “figures for average yield (of grain) which you read in the press these days reflect wishful thinking rather than reality.” 2“ He also said “unless we put things in order, our plans will be fulfilled statistically, but we will still be short of food.” 2° More recently a Soviet emigre characterized the manipulation of Sovi- et agricultural statistics as follows. “Soviet hens lay a certain percentage more eggs each year but with one biological peculiarity. The annual increase in egg laying begins only with the advent to power of the durrent rulers.”’° While we cannot pinpoint the degree of unreliability in Soviet statistics, we can identify those statistical series that are most unreliable. The larger the share of output that originates in the private sector, for exam- ple, the more error is likely to occur. Private sector output is estimated by the Central Statistical Admin- istration from a sample survey of collective farm families. Data are collected by schedule takers who visit each family not less than two times a month. 1’ Karl-Eugen Wadekin, “Soviet Agricultural Statistics: Summary and Assessment,” in Treml and Hardt, p. 282. “ N. S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, (Strobe Talbott, ed.), Little, Brown and Co., Boston, Toronto, 1974, p. 131. 2° Quoted from the New York Times report on January 15, 1961 (p. 28) of the I961 Party Plenum. ’° Lev Navrozov, “What the CIA Knows About Russia,” Commen- tary, September, 1978, p. 51. Efforts are made to choose “representative” families, but the survey embraces only 1.5 to 2 percent of collective farm families. The following tabulation shows the percentage of gross output of major pro- ducts produced by the private sector in 1979: 59.0 30.0 29.0 33.0 19.0 Grain 1.0 Potatoes Cotton 0 Meat Sugarbeets 0 Milk Sunflower seed 2.0 Eggs Vegetables 31 .0 Wool The figures suggest that the livestock sector is more affected than the crop sector by inaccuracies in estimates of private sector production. One Western writer on Soviet statistics concludes that the degree of error in these statistics is difficult to assess without more detail on the sample coverage. We can only be aware that such error exists." Socialized sector output statistics are derived from the annual reports of farms. These reports are based on an elaborate accounting system that is said to incorpo- rate cross-checks to prevent error and falsification. Such a system should provide accurate statistics, but failure to follow prescribed practice and shortages of qualified statisticians and bookkeepers introduce an element of error at the initial stage. Moreover, farms have no incentive to correct for waste because reduc- tions in gross output entail more difficulty in plan fulfillment and higher unit costs, whereas succesds requires high output and low unit cost. For example, farms frequently fail to weigh their output accurately. Truck scales are in short supply and often faulty. Grain output is thus often estimated according to the fullness of the combine hopper, although it is supposed to be weighed prior to record- ing in output accounts. For potatoes and vegetables, output estimates are haphazard. Potatoes are fre- quently stored in the fields in pits or piles. The weight of output is determined according to the dimensions of “ Eberhard Schinke, “Soviet Agricultural Statistics,” in Treml and Hardt, p. 244. 262 Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 399 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.