Hough and history

[Extract] One of my best memories of Jerry Hough, to whom I was married from 1975 to 1983, is of conversations on research trips to Moscow after I had spent a day in the archives. Jerry was a data man: he was fascinated by new unprocessed information of all sorts, and he loved the idea of creating data, as in the "Hospital Beds" study David Laitin discusses in this forum. As his daughter Susan rightly says, Jerry was like a physical scientist who by some accident of fate found himself working among social scientists (560). I liked data, too—in particular the data I was finding in Soviet archives, which was doubly exciting because access to Soviet archives was still so difficult for foreigners. I was working then in the archives of the People's Commissariat (in effect, Ministry) of Heavy Industry for the early 1930s in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution and Socialist Construction (now the State Archive of the Russian Federation or GARF) for a never-completed project on the politics of industrialization, and what I was finding there were lively bureaucratic conflicts over policy that my ministry, headed by a senior Politburo member (Sergo Ordzhonikidze) often won. This fascinated me, and it also fascinated Jerry. In the evenings, we would examine the day's haul of new data from every angle.