The Rise of Non-Leninist Thinking on the Economy

Abstract

Almost half a century has gone by since Wassili Leontief wrote ‘The fall and rise of Soviet economics’. And indeed at that time there had already been a marked recovery from the miserable state into which the discipline had been plunged in Stalin’s time. One can only note with regret and a kind of nostalgia the high quality of the profession in the 1920s: Aleksandr Chayanov (peasant agriculture and cooperation), Nikolay Kondrat’ev (long and short cycles, growth theory), Vladimir Bazarov (theories of value and of socialist industrialisation), L. Yurovsky and S. Fal’kner (money and finance), Vladimir Groman and Pavel Popov (balances of the national economy) were men of great distinction. All were destroyed.