Anderson was born from a Baltic German family in Minsk (now in Belarus), but soon moved to Kazan (Russia).

In 1912 he married Margarethe Natalie von Hindenburg-Hirtenberg,[1] a granddaughter of Wilhelm Paul von Hindenburg-Hirtenberg [ru][6] who was commemorated in "The Funeral of 'The Universal Man'" in Dostoyevsky's A Writer's Diary, and started lecturing at a commercial school in St. Petersburg while also studying for a law degree at the University of Saint Petersburg, graduating in 1914.

[1] In 1918 he took on a professorship in Kiev but he was forced to flee Russia in 1920 due to the Russian Revolution, first taking a post in Budapest (Hungary) before becoming a professor at the University of Economics at Varna (Bulgaria) in 1924.

[9] Supported by the foundation, in 1935 he established and became director of the Statistical Institute for Economic Research at the University of Sofia.

[10] For the remainder of the decade he also served the League of Nations as an associate member of its Committee of Statistical Experts.