Grigorii Khanin


Grigorii Isaakovich Khanin is a Russian economist best known for his 1987 recalculation of official Soviet Union's economic growth statistics. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he began recalculating Russian economic statistics. His recalculations differed substantially from the official figures, particularly for the value of the capital stock.
His work on the economic history of the Soviet Union and Russia has always been controversial, but well grounded in the available statistics. For example, he argued that the New Economic Policy had exhausted itself and that therefore Joseph Stalin's break with it had a serious economic logic. He also argued that Stalin was planning a liberalisation policy shortly before his death.
Khanin's recalculated statistics were estimated using a variant of the physical indicators method. They were based on the output data for a small number of sectors which were used to generate estimates for mesoeconomic and macroeconomic data. These estimates were checked by using several variant values for the constituent data. Although crude and difficult to replicate, this method may well have given a better picture of the economy than the official data. He has also integrated his alternative statistics into a series of books on the economic history of the Soviet Union and Russia from the late 1930s to 1998.
A feature of his work has been the utilisation of a wide range of published sources in both Russian and English. He published a whole book critically evaluating Western estimates of Soviet economic growth and has published a very positive review of Robert William Davies's work on the economic history of the USSR in the 1930s.

Published works