Vasilii Egorovich Varzar

(also Varzer). Born 1851; died Sept. 9, 1940. Soviet statistician and economist; founder of industrial statistics in Russia.

Varzar graduated from the St. Petersburg Technological Institute in 1875; in his student days he was involved in the work of the revolutionary Narodniks (Populists). He was the author of a widely read brochure “Clever Mechanics” (1874) on the antidemocratic nature of the tsarist government’s tax policies. In 1876, in collaboration with A. A. Rusov and P. P. Chervinskii, he organized a department of statistics for the Chernigov zemstvo (district assembly) executive board (of which he later became president) and developed the so-called Chernigov method of zemstvo statistics. The first two statistical investigations of Russian industry (actually censuses) were carried out on his initiative and under his leadership in 1900 and 1908. V. I. Lenin used materials from these “Varzar censuses” in an article published in Pravda on Aug. 21, 1912, entitled “Workers’ Earnings and Capitalists’ Profits in Russia” (see Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 22, pp. 24-25). Varzar is also known for three statistical works on industrial workers’ strikes for 1895-1904, 1905, and 1906-08.

After the October Revolution, Varzar worked in the Supreme Council of the National Economy and the Central Statistical Administration, and he also taught in institutions of higher learning. In 1925-27 he published a major theoretical work, Essays on the Bases of Industrial Statistics, in which he examined two fundamental problems of Soviet and foreign statistics: the industrial organization as an observational unity (vol. 1), and the classification of industrial production (vol. 2).