{"id":32420,"date":"2017-04-13T01:00:10","date_gmt":"2017-04-13T05:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32420"},"modified":"2017-04-03T08:44:32","modified_gmt":"2017-04-03T12:44:32","slug":"qotd-soviet-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/04\/13\/qotd-soviet-statistics\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Soviet statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Being a correspondent in Moscow, I found, was, in itself, easy enough. The Soviet press was the only source of news; nothing happened or was said until it was reported in the newspapers. So all I had to do was go through the papers, pick out any item that might be interesting to readers of the <em>Guardian<\/em>, dish it up in a suitable form, get it passed by the censor at the Press Department, and hand it in at the telegraph office for dispatch. One might, if in a conscientious mood, embellish the item a little &#8230; sow in a little local colour, blow it up a little, or render it down a little according to the exigencies of the new situation. The original item itself was almost certainly untrue or grotesquely distorted. One\u2019s own deviations, therefore, seemed to matter little, only amounting to further falsifying what was already false.<\/p>\n<p>This bizarre fantasy was very costly and elaborate and earnestly promoted. Something gets published in <em>Pravda<\/em>; say, that the Soviet Union has a bumper wheat harvest \u2013 so many poods per hectare. There is no means of checking; the Press Department men don\u2019t know, and anyone who does is far, far removed from the attentions of foreign journalists. Soviet statistics have always been almost entirely fanciful, though not the less seriously regarded fro that. When the Germans occupied Kiev in the 1939-45 war they got hold of a master Five Year Plan, showing what had really been produced and where. Needless to say, it was quite different from the published figures. This in no way affected credulity about such figures subsequently, as put out in Russia, or even in China.<\/p>\n<p>Malcolm Muggeridge, <em>Chronicles of Wasted Time<\/em>, 2006.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Being a correspondent in Moscow, I found, was, in itself, easy enough. The Soviet press was the only source of news; nothing happened or was said until it was reported in the newspapers. So all I had to do was go through the papers, pick out any item that might be interesting to readers of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7,41],"tags":[459,712,780,269,433,290],"class_list":["post-32420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","category-quotations","tag-censorship","tag-centralplanning","tag-communism","tag-propaganda","tag-sovietunion","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8qU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32420"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32421,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32420\/revisions\/32421"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}