Tribute to Anatole Vichnevski

Anatoly Vishnevsky left us on January 15, 2021, after a battle with Covid-19 that he fought with all his  familiar energy. He was 86. Up to the moment of his personal encounter with this terrible pandemic Vishnevsky pursued his exceptional engagement in demographic research as director of Russia’s internationally renowned NRU-HSE Institute of Demography in Moscow, the country’s finest demographic research center. His death is an immense loss for Russian demography and will impact its standing beyond national borders.

Anatoly Vishnevsky was born on April 1, 1935, in Kharkov, Ukraine, where he studied and became a statistician. After a stint at Ukraine’s Institute of Statistics in Kiev, he moved to Moscow in the early 1970s, where he worked for over ten years at the Institute of Statistics Department of Demographic Research. There was in close contact with the great demographers and statisticians of the time—Boyarski, Urlanis, Kurman, Sifman—survivors, and witnesses, of Stalin’s purges. And with the demographers Andreev, Darsky, Kharkova, and Volkov, with whom he would work, after the advent of Perestroika, to reconstitute the long-hidden history of Russian and Soviet demography. These relationships had a profound effect on him, and he later wrote in detail on this tragic period in Soviet demography and statistics. His encounters with these colleagues surely go some way to explaining how he became as much a historian as a demographer.

In 1984 Vishnevsky joined the Demography Department of the Soviet Academy of Science’s Institute of Sociology in Moscow, where he quickly took advantage of the opportunities offered by Perestroika by setting up several demography centers. The Institute of Demography of the NRU-HSE (National Research University-Higher School of Economics), or “Vyshka,” was his last creation. Founded in 2006, it became the reference in Russia and acquired an international dimension through its cooperation with the most important European and US demography institutes and centers, in particular Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and, of course, INED. 

Throughout his career, Anatoly Vishnevsky was a creator. In addition to running the Moscow Institute of Demography, and in collaboration with INED, he launched a Russian version of the monthly French bulletin Population & Sociétés (also published in English), which then became the e-journal Demoscope Weekly—a reference in the field. More recently he created the scientific journal Демографическое обозрение. 

As attested by his substantial oeuvre, Anatoly Vishnevsky was a highly cultivated man, an intellectual in the French sense of the word, a member of the intelligentsia in the Russian sense. Alongside his classic demography works, including The Demographic Revolution (1976) and the collective work he edited, The Demographic Modernization of Russia 1900-2000 (2006), of which there are no French translations, two great works of his have been translated into French: La faucille et le rouble: La modernisation conservatrice en URSS [The sickle and the ruble: conservative modernization in the USSR], published in 2000 in Gallimard’s prestigious “Bibliothèque des Histoires” series, whose title and interpretive framework remain strikingly relevant twenty years later; and his “novel,” Lettres interceptées (Gallimard, 2005), not so much fiction as a documentary reconstruction of tragic family histories based on a corpus of family correspondence, memories, and narratives. This is a powerfully written book, a wonderful essay on the dramatic, painful history of the USSR. 

Anatoly Vishnevsky was a great friend of France and passionately interested in French demography. He established contact with the French demography community even before Perestroika, at a time when doing so was still extremely difficult and risky. His experience, knowledge, and resources won him quick recognition in France as an invaluable colleague. Vishnevsky developed a particularly strong relationship with INED, French demographic study, and France in general. Quite early on, he worked to diffuse the research of Alfred Sauvy. In the very early 1980s, INED director Gérard Calot decided to develop relations with Russia. Keenly aware that despite differing political contexts, demographic policy and interpretation of demographic trends and changes were shared areas of interest, Calot was concerned to establish contact with what were then called the Eastern European countries. Exchanges began: visits of varying lengths, internships, joint conferences and talks. By then Anatoly Vishnevsky had joined the Demography Department of the Institute of Sociology. With his fluent French and strong knowledge of French demography he was the natural contact for French colleagues. At the time his department was run by Leonid Rybakovsky, a strong advocate of international relations. But in the context of Perestroika, Rybakovsky and Vishnevsky soon came into conflict as Vishnevsky insisted on a level of scientific rigor not always congenial to Russian science, wide open to politicization. Vishnevsky soon started several Franco-Russian research collaborations, sending young colleagues—his élèves as it were—to France to organize a number of projects. Two of those colleagues—Serge Zakharov and Vladimir Shkolnikov—continued to pursue that work, while Yulia Florinskaia, Galina Rakhmanova, Elena Dolgikh, Alexander Anichkin, and others developed collaborative projects that further strengthened Vishnevsky’s ties with INED. Long-lasting collaborations ensued: on mortality, Soviet and Russian population history, and many other questions.

Anatoly Vishnevsky’s passion for his discipline and for scientific research meant that he readily joined in public debates, exposing himself to attack several times in the Russian context, which has been particularly tense in recent years. But he always argued his positions uncompromisingly, valuing scientific rigor above all, devoted to top quality demographic study and analysis. 

More than anything, however, Anatoly Vishnevsky was a very kind person, a friend, always willing to listen, firm in his opinions but attentive to others. He transmitted this quality to the students and colleagues who accompanied him in the long process of building the Institute of Demography in Moscow, and he conveyed it to his French colleagues, with whom he met every year, in Paris, in Moscow, ever attentive to the latest developments in demography. Vishnevsky radiated an amazing energy, a passionate desire to understand, and total commitment to his convictions. He had many enemies in Russia, impatient to impose political ideology on demography—a move he rejected in the name of science. But his qualities also won him immense respect, not only as a researcher but also a public figure invited to speak often on radio and television.

The world of demography has lost a great researcher. And INED has lost a colleague who valued and promoted French demographic research; a man who, through the collaborative projects he initiated, positioned our Institute on the cutting edge of demographic research on the entire territory of the former Soviet Union. 

But we have also lost a close friend—endearing, intensely engaging, profoundly kind.

Alain Blum, Maité Ely, France Meslé, Vladimir Shkolnikov, Jacques Vallin, Serge Zakharov