Orzhentskii, Roman Mikhailovich

Orzhentskii, Roman Mikhailovich 

Born Feb. 16 (28), 1863, in Zhitomir; died May 24, 1923, in Warsaw. Russian economist and statistician. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1919).

Orzhentskii graduated from the law faculty of Novaia Rossiia University in Odessa in 1887. Until 1907 he worked in government institutions of Odessa. He also taught at a commercial school and at a merchant marine school and was active in the trade union movement. In 1910 he became head of the bureau of the valuation and statistics of the Yaroslavl zemstvo (provincial self-government).

After the October Socialist Revolution of 1917, Orzhentskii organized studies on budgeting, trends in the national economy, and the movement of market prices at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. Chairman of the academy’s subdepartment of theoretical economics in Kiev from 1920, Orzhentskii headed the department of economics and social studies in 1920–21 and directed the publication of the Statisticheskii biulleten’.

Orzhentskii’s work in economics developed the subjective psychological approach to the study of economic phenomena typified by the Austrian school. As a statistician, he worked out mathematical methods for the quantitative measurement of mass social phenomena.

WORKS

Uchenie of ekonomicheskom iavlenii: Vvedenie v teoriiu tsennosti. Odessa, 1903.
Svodnye priznaki. Yaroslavl, 1910.
Uchebnik matematicheskoi statistiki. St. Petersburg, 1914.
Elementarnaia teoriia statisticheskikh velichin i vychislenii. Kiev, 1921.

REFERENCE

Istoriia russkoi ekonomicheskoi mysli, vol. 3, part 1. Moscow, 1966. Chapters 7–8.