Igor Birman

Igor Yakovlevich Birman (July 25, 1928 – April 6, 2011) was a Russian-American economist.

Birman was born in Moscow in 1928.

He graduated from the Statistical Institute in 1949, and earned a Ph.D. in Economics (кандидат экономических наук)in 1960.

He received his Ph.D. in 1960.

He authored a number of books translated into four languages and some 200 articles in professional periodicals and also in the popular press (Izvestia, Literaturnaya gazeta, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post).

He was Director of Planning in three factories, worked in scientific institutes, and was a member of the commission on economic reform (1965).

In 1974 Birman emigrated to the United States, where was employed chiefly as a consultant on the Soviet economy for The Pentagon and taught at two universities.

He argued against economic estimates made by the CIA and Sovietologists, particularly, the size of the economy, comparative level of living, share and size of military expenditures, deficit of the state budget, etc. Together with Valery Chalidze he edited the magazine «Russia».

Birman is best known for having criticized U.S. economists specializing in the Soviet Union (sovietologists) and CIA analysts for misunderstanding Soviet reality.

Birman argued that the CIA overestimated the size of the Soviet economy and that the Soviets were spending as much as 30% of their GNP on the military.

In an article in the Washington Post published On October 27, 1980, he said that the Soviet economy was in a state of crisis.

According to one analyst, "Outside critics had often attacked the CIAʼs operational side but never its analysis, and certainly not from the political Right. …… In 1986, the CIAʼs analysts insisted that the Soviet economy was about to expand… Three years later, the Soviet Union collapsed."

With the opening up of the Soviet Union and its records, Birman's assertions were supported by Soviet economists themselves.

Though his predictions turned out to be correct, American academics were skeptical of his assertions, and his work was not published in the major journals.

Birman was criticized for not relying on Western economic theory and mathematical models in conducting his analyses of the Soviet economy.

Instead, he advocated for including data from what he called "anecdotal economics," relying in part on his visceral understanding of the Soviet Union, lived experience, simple logic, and intuition that could not be quantified or modeled.

Igor Birman died on April 6, 2011 at his home in Rockville, MD. He was survived by his wife of 53 years Albina Tretyakova Birman; his children Julia Shildkret (George), Dina Birman (Ed Trickett), and Igor Birman (Elysa); and grandchildren Mark Shildkret, Michelle Keinan, Nicholas Trickett, Alexander Trickett, Ashley Birman, and Zoey Birman.

and co-authored and edited several books, for example: