Editor's Introduction

During the years of Soviet rule it was not uncommon for Western scholars to question the reliability of official Soviet statistics in a variety of areas. For obvious reasons, similar questions could not be directly raised in the domestic Soviet literatureâat least in the pre->i>glasnost>/i> era. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the current Russian social science literature on the Soviet period often reflects a highly critical assessment of the earlier official data. Our opening selection by V.A. Isupov ("Demographic Catastrophes in Russia") argues that the negative demographic consequences of Soviet rule were substantially understated in official population statistics. The author's own estimates of demographic trends appear to justify the title of the article, although the precise methods used to derive these estimates are not always clear. Isupov also seems concerned to stress the responsibility of the regime in power for the "catastrophes" in questionâincluding the wartime population losses.