Nemchinov, Vasily Sergeevich (1894–1964)

Abstract

Born the son of a State Bank messenger in Grabovo, Russia, on 2 January 1894; died in Moscow on 5 November 1964. Nemchinov graduated from the Moscow Commercial Institute between the February and October Revolutions of 1917, but joined the Communist Party only in 1940 on appointment as Director of the K.A. Timiryazev Agricultural Institute, the Statistics Faculty of which he had headed since 1928. He showed courage in prohibiting from his Institute the pseudo-genetics (‘Michurinism’) of T.D. Lysenko, but when at Stalin’s instigation mainstream genetics were condemned in 1948 he was forced from the directorship. The Academy of Sciences (to which he had been elected in 1946) then made him chairman of its Council for the Study of Productive Resources, a post retained (with a chair at the party’s Academy of Social Sciences) until his fatal illness. In 1958 he established the first group in the USSR to study mathematical economics (from 1963 the Central Economic Mathematical Institute) and was posthumously awarded a Lenin Prize for elaborating linear programming and economic modelling for the USSR.