Career
After the collapse of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics he began recalculating Russian economic statistics. His recalculations differed substantially from the official figures, particularly for the value of the capital stock. His work on the economic history of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics and Russia has always been controversial, but well grounded in the available (often adjusted by him) statistics.
Foreign example, he argued that NEP had exhausted itself and that therefore Stalin"s break with it had a serious economic logic.
He also argued that shortly before his death Stalin was planning a liberalisation policy. Khanin"s recalcuated statistics were estimated using a variant of the physical indicators method.
They were based on the output data for a small number of sectors (eg, electricity production and freight transport) which were used to generate estimates for mesoeconomic and macroeconomic data. These estimates were checked by using several variant values for the constituent data.
Although crude, and difficult to replicate, this method may well have given a better picture of the economy than the official data.
He has also integrated his alternative statistics into a series of books on the economic history of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics/Russia from the late 1930s to 1998. A feature of his work has been the utilisation of a wide range of published sources in both Russian and English. He published a whole book critically evaluating Western estimates of Soviet economic growth and has published a very positive review of R. West. Davies"s work on the economic history of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics in the 1930s.