Ianson, Iulii

Born Oct. 15 (27), 1835, in Kiev; died Jan. 31 (Feb. 12), 1893, in St. Petersburg. Russian statistician and economist. Member of the Statistics Council of the Ministry of the Interior and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences (1892). Chairman of the division of statistics and epidemiology of the Russian Society for the Protection of Public Health from 1884 and member of the International Statistics Institute from 1885. Honorary member of many Russian and foreign scientific societies.

Ianson wrote on the theory and history of statistics and on demography. His Essay on the Statistical Investigation of Peasant Allotments and Payments (1877) was cited by V. I. Lenin as a just evaluation of the hard lot endured by the peasantry after the reform of 1861 (see Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 15, p. 131). In Comparative Statistics of Russia and the Western European States (1878–80), Ianson sharply criticized the manner in which statistics was organized in tsarist Russia. Ianson succeeded in having a statistics department established at the St. Petersburg gorodskaia uprava (executive body of the municipal duma), and in 1882 he began publishing the Statistical Yearbook of St. Petersburg, the first work of its kind in Russia. In 1881 and 1890, Ianson directed two censuses of the population of St. Petersburg, which served as a model for subsequent city censuses.