Voznesensky, Nikolai Alekseevich (1903–1950)

Abstract

Voznesensky (born the son of a timber dealer in Teploe, Russia, on 18 November 1903; executed on 30 September 1950) joined the Bolshevik Party in 1919 and studied political economy at the Institute of Red Professors, Moscow, where he stayed on as lecturer. His publications – fewer than 30, his culminating manuscript being destroyed by the police – have been analysed by Harrison (1985) and Sutela (1984). In a concept later to be termed ‘unbalanced growth’ by A. O. Hirschman, he saw that the national plan ‘must localize bottlenecks, not for adapting them, but for doing away with them’. Ranging himself against those who argued that comprehensive planning invalidated money calculations, he had by 1935 embraced the position – which was to figure in Stalin’s indictment of him in 1949 – that money would have a distributive function even when all means of production had been nationalized. His association with the Leningrad circle which eventually led to his execution also began in 1935, for A.A. Zhdanov, having replaced the assassinated S.M. Kirov as Leningrad Party Secretary, invited Voznesensky to lead that city’s plan organization under an Executive Committee headed by A.N. Kosygin.