Milestones of a Century-Long Journey of the Russian Professional Statistical Journal

Abstract

This article briefly outlines milestones for the Russian information and science journal «Voprosy statistiki» amid its 100th anniversary. The paper addresses the story behind the establishment of a national professional periodical journal and presents objective and goals set before at its creation in January 1919. A point of emphasis is that applied mathematics is vital for shaping statistics as a tool, in contemporary terms, of modelling socio-economic processes. There is a need for aiming statistics at obtaining specific practical effects in executive decision-making.

There is an attempt to set a historical timeline of the evolution of editorial policy and provide a brief content-related description of publishing activities, advanced topics in statistics at some stages of development of the country, place of statistics in society, its relationship with the state. The author mentions issues of the journal dating to various periods of the journal history: pre-war and post-war, the Thaw, perestroika, post-perestroika and modern period. The paper references relevant articles authored by Russian and various foreign statisticians, researchers, professors, practitioners in statistics. The author identifies the role of journal founder in developing common content-related strategy, improvement of editorial policy. The article describes the evolution of the editorial policy in the last 25 years, modern day issues and challenges facing the journal editors and possible solutions for them.