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\noindent{\bf Fedor Andreevich SHCHERBINA}\\
b. 13 February (o.s.) 1849 - d. 28 October 1936
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\noindent {\bf Summary}. Shcherbina was the most eminent of the zemstvo
statisticians in the Russian Empire; his work served as a prototype in the 
field, and Lenin used his data.  As an \'{e}migr\'{e} professor in Prague, he 
published a history of statistics.
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\noindent Shcherbina was born in the Cossack settlement of Novodereviankovskaia
(Novodereviankivka {\it stanytsia}) in the Kuban' River region of the Russian Empire,
the son of a priest.  Such settlements (stanytsi) derived from and continued
the democratic and military traditions of the Dnieper Cossacks.  At age 12 he
entered the military theological school in the region's capital Ekaterinodar
(from 1920: Krasnodar), and in 1866 the theological seminary of the Caucasus
at Stavropol'.  His teachers were sympathetic to the Populist movement
(intellectuals ``going out among the common people"), and like his
idealist generation he was influenced by the writings of N.G.
Chernishevsky (1828-1889) and political economists such as John Stuart
Mill, Lasalle, Becher, and especially Pfeiffer on cooperative activity.
 With 6 other seminarians, he left the seminary and founded the first
agricultural cooperative (``collective farm") in Russia, which, however,
foundered within 3 years because of lack of knowledge and experience.
Seeking to deepen his knowledge, with financial support sympathetically
provided by a Cossack military stipend Shcherbina entered in 1872 the
Petrovsko-Rozumovsky Academy of Agriculture and Forestry in Moscow.  He
had to leave on account of his student political activity and moved to
the Faculty of Science of the Novorossisk University in Odessa in 1874,
which year saw the beginning of the destruction (1874-1877) of the
Populist movement, with some 3000 of its activists sentenced to
imprisonment or banishment.  Among them was Shcherbina, who was sent to
the Vologda {\it gubernia} (province) in 1876.

In those backward, impoverished and isolated communities, he committed
himself to the socio-economic study of the common people, and the year
 1879 saw the publication of the first
 monographic\footnote{The
``monographic method" pervaded early attempts at representative
sampling.  It amounted to selecting a cluster of elements ``typical" of
population, and their extensive investigation.} study of agriculture of
any region in Russia.  He was pardoned in 1800 and returned to the
Kuban' region to continue in pacifist manner his populist investigation,
largely of this locality.

The next, most stable and active, stage of Shcherbina's life began with
his taking up in 1884 the directorship of the statistical department of
the Voronezh {\it zemstvo}. \ The zemstvos were institutions of local
government established from 1864 in the course of the great political
and social reforms.  Their statistical departments came to concern
themselves with the rural economy of the European part of the Russian
 Empire.  Shcherbina remained at this post for some 18 years, editing
 66 volumes of statistics of the Voronezh gubernia and producing 16
 separate books on related topics.  For his history (1891) of the
Voronezh zemstvo, he received from the Imperial Academy of Science a
Tsar Aleksandr II Prize.  His {\it Krest'ianskie biudzhety
(Peasant budgets)} of 477 pages published in 1900 was a
highlight of the intense statistical activity in Russia of the time,
in which Shcherbina's work had served as a model for other
statisticians. Its Chapter II, on budget investigation in foreign countries, reveals
familiarity with developments in Western Europe, such as the work of
Quetelet (q.v.), Sir Frederick Morton Eden (q.v.), the International Statistical
Congresses and the London Statistical Society.  Shcherbina is listed
among the editorial staff of the {\it Bolshaia Entsiklopedia (The Great
Encyclopedia)} published in St. Petersburg around 1900.  There is a
substantial entry under the title {\it Statistika} in volume 17, which
he may have authored, which divides the statistical studies of the time
into the ``formal" and the ``material".  \ The first, as defined by
von Mayr (q.v.), is said to be exhaustive numerical description of an
 entire population.  (The ``material" is said to be ``statistical
science", where causes and effects are inferred from numerical
investigation.)  In his later book (Shcherbyna, 1925; the transliteration of the
Ukrainian form of his name is Fedir Andrievych Shcherbyna), he mentions
the ``new mathematical direction" of statistics based on random sampling
of which the chief Russian protagonist is named as A.A. Chuprov (q.v.).
Shcherbina to the end of his days, like von Mayr, remained opposed in
principle to this direction.

In continuing sympathy with the efforts of the zemstvos and bourgeoisie
to improve the lot of the peasantry and workers he wrote an influential pamphlet in
1902 on the needs of the peasant-agricultural economy, demanding amongst
other things unacceptable to the then-regime, a constitutional system
of government.  After being questioned in early 1903 as a result he was sent
into administrative banishment in the Kuban' region, under police
surveillance.  During this time he researched his book on the history of
the Kuban' Cossack Host, and due to its widespread popularity (the work
was known to Tsar Nikolai (Nicholas II)) was permitted to revive in 1906,
and then head, the Cossack Council, a form of governing body, in the
Kuban'. \ In 1904 Shcherbina was elected Corresponding Member of the
Imperial Academy of Sciences, and in 1907 was elected to the second Duma
 (Russian parliament) as a Populist Socialist.  After the revolution of
February 1917 the people of the Kuban' region and of Ukraine sought
existence as independent republics. \ Shcherbina was elected to the
Kuban' Legislative Council (1917-1920) and headed the supreme court of
the Kuban' Cossack Host.  At this time his cultural orientation began to
revert to his ancestral Ukrainian.  When the Bolsheviks had subjugated
the Kuban' in 1920, he emigrated to Yugoslavia.  During the journey
across the Black Sea by ship, for his Kuban' Cossack ``separatism"
he was nearly thrown overboard by fleeting Russian White Guard officers.

During a short period in Yugoslavia he wrote a scathing attack from an
economic standpoint of the 3 years Bolshevik rule in Russia (Shcherbina,
1921) which was printed in Prague to which he had moved.  Here he was
made full professor (1922-1936) and rector (1924-1925) at the Ukrainian
Free University.  He also taught statistics at the Ukrainian Husbandry
Academy [Polytechnic] at Pod\v{e}brady.  These institutions were
distinct from the Russian College in Prague, with which A.A. Chuprov,
as fellow statistical \'{e}migr\'{e} from the Russian Empire,
had a brief association.  The years in Prague saw the publication of
Shcherbina's history of statistics (Shcherbyna, 1925), remarkable for
its historical scholarship and detailed insight into  pre-revolutionary
Russian developments.

The fifth edition of Lenin's collected works, Volume 3, is aware of the
year of his death, but, unlike the second edition concludes with the
statement ``V.I. Lenin severely criticized the author's incorrect methods
of analysis, which distorted reality of statistical data". \ However,
Lenin had used Shcherbina's data extensively, and Soviet writers
continued to accord him respect.

Shcherbina, therefore due to his eminence, longevity and immense careful
producitivity figures in all three of the politically incommensurate:  
tsarist {\it Entsiklopedicheskii
Slovar (Encyclopedic Dictionary)} (1904), the {\it Bolshaia Sovietskaiia
Entsiklopediia (Great Soviet Encyclopedia)} (1957), and the
\'{e}migr\'{e} {\it Encyclopedia of Ukraine} (English version: 1993).  \
 It testifies to the universality of statistics.
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\begin{thebibliography}{3}

\bibitem{1}   Kotz, S. and Seneta, E. (1990). Lenin as a Statistician:
a Non-Soviet View. {\it Journal of the Royal Statistical Society,
Series A}, {\bf 153}, 73-94.

\bibitem{2}   Mytsiuk [Mycjuk], O. (1931). {\it Naukova Diialnist'
Statystyka F.A. Shcherbyny. (The Scientific Work of the Statistician
F.A. Shcherbina)}. \ \'{E}dition de l'\'{E}cole Polytechnique
 Ukra\H{i}nienne en Tch\'{e}coslovaquie, Pod\v{e}brady.
\ [29pp. Written in
Ukrainian for Shcherbina's 80th birthday.  Includes summaries in Czech
and English.]

\bibitem{3}   R., D. (1904). Shcherbina (Fedor' Andreevich') {\it
Entsiklopedicheskii Slovar' (Brokgauz (Brockhaus) - Efron)}.
{\bf 79}, 68-69. [Only the initials, D.R., of the entry's author are given.] 

\bibitem{4}   Shcherbina, F.A. (1921). {\it Zakoni Evoliutsii i Russkii
Bolshevizm. (Evolutionary Laws and  Russian Bolshevism.)} Russkaia Misl',
Belgrade. Slavianskoe Izdatelstvo, Prague.

\bibitem{5}   Shcherbyna, F.A. (1925). {\it Statystyka. Istoriia
Statystyky i Statystychnykh Ustanov. (Statistics. A History of
Statistics and Statistical Institutions.)} Ukra\H{i}nskyy Hromadskyy
Vydavnychyy Fond, Prague.

\bibitem{6}   Zhukovsky, A. (1993). Shcherbyna, Fedir. {\it Encyclopedia
of Ukraine.} (ed. Danylo Husar Struk), {\bf 4}, 626. [University of
Toronto Press, Toronto.]

\bibitem{7}  $--$ (1957). Shcherbina, Fedor Andreevich (1849-1936) {\it
Bolshaia Sovietskaia Entsiklopediia} (ed. B.A. Vvedenskiy, 2nd edn.).
{\bf 48}, 265-266. [No author given.]
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\hfill{E. Seneta}

\end{thebibliography}

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