Sergei Andreevich Kharizomenov

Born 1854 in Vladimir; died 1917. Russian zemstvo statistician and economist.

Kharizomenov graduated from the University of Moscow in 1876. In the same year he became a member of Land and Liberty (Zemlia i volia), and at the Voronezh Congress of 1879 he joined the Black Repartition (Chernyi peredel). In the early 1880’s he left the revolutionary movement and worked in the field of zemstvo statistics.

Kharizomenov’s first work was a descriptive study of the handicraft industries of Vladimir Province (1882); his subsequent article, “The Significance of Cottage Industries” (1883), was singled out by V. I. Lenin as an “excellent work.” In summarizing the data on such industries, Kharizomenov “reached the conclusion that there is an absolute predominance of the domestic system of large-scale production [in the cottage industries], i.e., an unquestionably capitalist form of industry” (V. I. Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 1, p. 211).

In 1884–85, together with K. A. Verner, Kharizomenov carried out a census of the households in the Melitopol’ District of Tavrida Province, using the combinatorial tabular calculation system. From 1885 to 1892 he supervised zemstvo statistical research in Saratov Province. He compiled a code of statistical information and contributed to a published collection of statistical information. In the first decade of the 20th century, Kharizomenov directed a descriptive and evaluative economic study of the provinces of Tula and Tver’. He wrote several works on statistics, and his articles on the peasants’ economic status were published in the journals Russkaia mysl’ and Iuridicheskii vestnik. Lenin made frequent use of Kharizomenov’s data in his works of the 1890’s.