The Principal Conflict in Contemporary Russian Economic Thought: Traditional Approaches Against Economics

The work deals with the ideological clashes in Russian economic thought after 1991. Based on Schumpeter's distinction between economic analysis and economic thought, the paper focuses on a principal conflict that divides a new generation of Westernminded scholars and traditional Russian political economists. This conflict, on the one hand, is described as an attempt of traditional political economists to keep their positions at the economic departments of the universities. The most vivid manifestation of the resistance to economics is the so-called Tsagolov School at Moscow State University. On the other hand, the conflict might be regarded as the reaction of Russian nationalism to the penetration of ?alien? influences that are rather incompatible with the antiindividualist traditions of Russian social thought. The movement towards the creation of a ?national political economy? based on holism and etatism is seen not only as an expression and a by-product of resistance to methodological individualism in economics, but also as implicitly state-induced ideological efforts in a period of transition to an autocratic regime in Russia

Centralism in a Planned Economy: Boundaries and Methods

One of the basic advantages of the socialist economy is centralized economic planning, and its further improvement is a natural requirement. Under present conditions, this task is complicated by the attained level of productive forces, which reveal the contradictory nature of the relationship between them and production relations and which demand the improvement of their forms.

How Was The "Administrative System" Created?

"Administrative system" can be introduced into both publicistic and scholarly use as a term that expresses the most characteristic features of the system of social relations that formed in our country in the 1930s and that left its mark on all subsequent development. Heightened attention to the events of that period is entirely natural. It is just as natural that it has also raised the question of the place of these events in the context of the historical development of socialism. What was it: a random historical eventâa deviation from the mainline due to the peripeteia of political struggle and the qualities of the people participating in them? Or was it historical necessity, the inevitable path of development of social relations only slightly perturbed by political storms?