ABSTRACT
Every state under the hammer and sickle instantly slips back into the dark ages when its government does not feel obligated to report to its people. In every one of them, the government rules arbitrarily and secretly and makes it a crime for any official to report these facts to the public. In every one of them, there is a blackout of statistics. Democracy began when governments started to make public their budgets, how they gathered their money and how they spent it. "The Russian tsarist government", Lenin wrote in 1903, "only survives by living in the dark, and that is why complete and truthful information about the life of the people in the whole country is rarely collected in our country". Lenin could never have written his Development of Capitalism in Russia in 1899 without population statistics, vital statistics, penal statistics and economic statistics.
