Historical political economy in Russia, 1870 – 1913

Abstract

This article hypothesizes the existence of a Russian strand of historical political economy in the period 1870 to 1913, in parallel with the more famous German and Irish examples. To substantiate this claim the works of various pre-revolutionary Russian economists are surveyed as short case studies, including that of I.K. Babst, A.I. Chuprov, I.Kh. Ozerov and D.I. Mendeleev. Moreover various common themes are identified in their work and also in comparison with the work of established historical economists such as Roscher and Schmoller. The Bolshevik revolution in 1917 is then conceived as a point of rupture in the natural evolution of Russian economic theory.

Keywords:

• Historical political economy
• cultural and institutional economics
• pre-revolutionary Russian economics
• Russian history before 1917

Notes

* This article is part of a larger project investigating ‘The Economic Mind in Russian Civilisation, 1880 – 1917’, funded by the ESRC (grant number R000239937). I am grateful to CREES, Birmingham University for providing institutional support, and to the helpful comments of two referees for suggested improvements.

D.A. Tolstoy was a Russian Minister of Education. See Mosse (1996: 58).

Hodgson (1988: 252 – 62) has emphasized the importance of systems thinking for institutional economics.

The debates between Slavophiles and their opponents, the Westernisers, focused to a large extent on how the Russian economy had developed historically.