Abstract

After the October 1917 Revolution the Bolshevik rulers considered that making a communist society in Russia required a new kind of statistical tools and data to describe and manage the economy and the society. The French sociologist and historian of statistics Alain Desrosières categorised five typical different configurations of State since the 18th century: the State engineer, the liberal State, the Welfare State, the Keynesian State, the neo-liberal State. Following this theoretical scheme may we make the hypothesis that a centralised and planified State such as the Soviet Union was could form a sixth typical configuration of State, that of State Planner? The article attempts to answer this question by studying how the time budget surveys were practiced and utilised in the Soviet Union to quantify the social use of time at work and out of work. In actual fact, Soviet statisticians thought out categories more adapted to describe the Soviet economy and the Soviet society, in particular the social structure and social activities.