# Yevgeni Preobrazhensky: views on planning and what we take from them — Open Planning
> Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was the first to pose the question that the entire Soviet economy would later have to answer: where would a poor peasant country find the means…
Источник / Source: https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/preobrazhensky
Язык / Language: en
Обновлено / Updated: 2026-09-15
---
History of planning · Industrialisation: at what cost to build

# Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky

1886–1937 · Bolshevik economist and publicist, secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) in 1920–1921, one of the leaders of the Left Opposition, author of The New Economics

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was the first to pose the question that the entire Soviet economy would later have to answer: where would a poor peasant country find the means for industrialization? His “law of primitive socialist accumulation” from The New Economics (Novaya ekonomika, 1926) became the centre of the main economic debate of the 1920s over the pace and price of growth. Without this debate it is impossible to understand why Soviet planning was, from the very beginning, above all a planning of the extraction and concentration of resources.

_Ye. A. Preobrazhensky, The Fundamental Law of Socialist Accumulation (Osnovnoy zakon sotsialisticheskogo nakopleniya, 1924); quoted from: N. I. Bukharin, A New Revelation about the Soviet Economy, or How to Destroy the Worker-Peasant Bloc (Novoe otkrovenie o sovetskoy ekonomike, ili Kak mozhno pogubit' raboche-krest'yanskiy blok). Moscow; Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1925, chapter 7 (translated by gosplan2.ru)_

Founders

- [Gleb Krzhizhanovsky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/krzhizhanovsky)

- [Stanislav Strumilin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/strumilin)

- [Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bazarov-groman)

- [Nikolai Kondratiev](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kondratiev)

Industrialisation

- [Yevgeni Preobrazhensky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/preobrazhensky)

- [Nikolai Bukharin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bukharin)

- [Nikolai Voznesensky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/voznesensky)

Balances and optimal planning

- [Wassily Leontief](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/leontief)

- [Leonid Kantorovich](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kantorovich)

- [Viktor Novozhilov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/novozhilov)

- [Vasily Nemchinov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/nemchinov)

- [Nikolai Fedorenko](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/fedorenko)

Cybernetics and reforms

- [Viktor Glushkov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/glushkov)

- [Evsei Liberman](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/liberman)

- [Stafford Beer](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/beer)

- [Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/cockshott)

Critics

- [Ludwig von Mises](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/mises)

- [Friedrich Hayek](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/hayek)

- [Oskar Lange](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/lange)

- [János Kornai](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kornai)

The administrative market

- [Vitaly Naishul](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/naishul)

- [Simon Kordonsky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kordonsky)

## Who he is and his times

Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky was born on 15 (27) February 1886 in Bolkhov, Oryol Governorate, into the family of a priest. As a gymnasium pupil, in 1903, he joined a Social Democratic circle in Oryol, and then studied briefly at the medical and law faculties of Moscow University. Before the revolution he was a professional underground activist and party publicist, not an economist in the academic sense. What made him an economist were the tasks facing the new government: the monetary system, the budget and taxes in a ruined country.

In October 1919, together with Nikolai Bukharin, he published The ABC of Communism — a popular mass commentary on the party programme from which thousands of new members learned. From 5 April 1920 to 16 March 1921 Preobrazhensky was one of the secretaries of the Central Committee of the RCP(b). According to biographical reference works, he then headed the Central Committee's financial committee and wrote about monetary circulation: his book Paper Money in the Epoch of the Proletarian Dictatorship (Bumazhnye den'gi v epokhu proletarskoy diktatury) appeared in 1920. This practical school of finance is visible in all his later works: he thought in terms of prices, tariffs and taxes.

With the transition to the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, a mixed economy took shape in the country. Large-scale industry, transport, banks and foreign trade belonged to the state, while agriculture remained millions of small peasant households linked to the city by the market. In 1923 Preobrazhensky signed the “Declaration of the 46” and became one of the leaders of the Left Opposition, which was close to Trotsky. The Left believed that NEP without a resolute policy in favour of industry would lead to the growth of private enterprise and, in the long run, to the restoration of capitalism.

The Communist Academy gave him a theoretical platform. In 1924 his article The Fundamental Law of Socialist Accumulation (Osnovnoy zakon sotsialisticheskogo nakopleniya) appeared in the Vestnik Kommunisticheskoy Akademii (book 8), and in 1926 the first part of the first volume of the book The New Economics: An Attempt at a Theoretical Analysis of the Soviet Economy (Novaya ekonomika. Opyt teoreticheskogo analiza sovetskogo khozyaystva) was published. The remaining parts were never published. The book became a synthesis of his earlier works and the main text of the Left's economic programme.

It is important to remember that the debate of the mid-1920s took place within a single party and a single ideology. Both Preobrazhensky and his opponents considered socialist industrialization and the preservation of state ownership of large-scale industry to be the goal; they differed over the pace, the sources of funds and the attitude towards the peasantry. That is why economic arguments in this debate were constantly intertwined with the struggle for power after Lenin's death, and a position on the question of accumulation became a mark of belonging to a faction.

## Main ideas

Preobrazhensky's starting point is an analogy with the “primitive accumulation of capital”, which Marx described as the historical period when resources for future industry were gathered at the expense of pre-capitalist modes of production. Preobrazhensky argued that a socialist state in a backward country passes through a similar stage. The state sector is still too small and too poor to grow solely on the basis of its own surplus product. This means that the funds for growth have to be obtained from outside this sector — above all from the peasant and private economy.

Hence the distinction between two concepts. By socialist accumulation he meant the addition of the surplus product of state enterprises to their productive assets. By primitive socialist accumulation he meant the concentration in the hands of the state of material resources drawn mainly from sources lying outside the state economy. According to his logic, in a backward peasant country it is the second method that predominates, and the whole period should be called a period of primitive accumulation until the state economy achieves “purely economic predominance” over the private economy.

The book's main theoretical claim is the concept of “two regulators”. In the Soviet economy, according to Preobrazhensky, two laws operate simultaneously: the law of value, that is, spontaneous market price formation, and the law of primitive socialist accumulation, which gradually restricts and partly eliminates the former. Accumulation as he presented it is not a programme that can be accepted or rejected, but an objective economic law comparable to the law of value in a market economy. This is an important move: the political choice of who pays for industrialization, and how much, was described as an inevitability.

The mechanisms of extraction that he discussed were not direct requisitions but economic instruments of state monopoly. These were pricing policy for industrial and agricultural goods, railway tariffs, the monopoly of the banking system and of foreign trade, and “socialist protectionism”. The key concept here is non-equivalent exchange: the state sells industrial goods to the peasants at higher prices, and buys their produce at lower prices, than would be the case on a free market, and the difference becomes a source of capital investment in industry. In other words, it is a hidden tax collected through prices.

Preobrazhensky attributed broad significance to his law. In a text quoted by Bukharin, the fundamental law of socialist accumulation is called the central driving spring of the entire Soviet state economy, and the author allowed that this law has universal significance. In his view, the role of primitive accumulation is especially great in a backward peasant country: there it must to an enormous degree hasten the moment when the state sector achieves economic predominance. Hence the logic of pace: the poorer the country and the smaller its industry, the more intensive the extraction must be, otherwise the private economy will grow faster than the state economy.

## What became of the ideas in practice

In the mid-1920s the Left's programme was rejected by the majority of the party leadership, which at that time united Stalin and Bukharin. The official line relied on the alliance of workers and peasants (the so-called smychka), the growth of peasant demand and gradual industrialization. In 1927 Preobrazhensky was removed from the collegium of the People's Commissariat of Finance (Narkomfin) and expelled from the party, and in January 1928 he was exiled to Uralsk. The New Economics itself then dropped out of the economic debate.

As early as 1928 Stalin turned to forced industrialization, and then to wholesale collectivization and against his recent allies — Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, who were declared a “Right deviation”. In historiography this turn is often described as the implementation of the Left's demands in a harsher form. The difference, however, is substantial: Preobrazhensky reasoned about price and tax mechanisms within a market that continued to exist, whereas Stalin's policy relied on compulsory procurement and the liquidation of individual peasant farming as a mass way of life.

Tellingly, in September 1928, in Notes of an Economist, Bukharin was arguing not so much with Preobrazhensky as with the new practice. He wrote that the notion that the maximum annual pumping of funds from the peasant economy into industry ensures the maximum pace of industrialization is clearly wrong. According to A. V. Shubin, formally this was a polemic with the defeated opposition, but in fact it was a polemic with Stalin's course. By that time the logic of extraction, first consistently described by Preobrazhensky, had passed from theoretical debate into state policy.

In July 1929 Preobrazhensky sent a letter announcing his break with the opposition, and in January 1930 he was readmitted to the party. In 1931 his book The Decline of Capitalism (Zakat kapitalizma), on reproduction and crises under imperialism and on the world crisis of 1930–1931, was published; as early as 1932 it was subjected to devastating criticism in a collection issued by an institute of the Communist Academy. In January 1933 he was expelled from the party again. He was given no role whatsoever in drawing up the five-year plans: the ideas associated with his name were applied without him and in a form he had not proposed.

## What worked and what did not

Preobrazhensky's strength is his honest formulation of the problem. He did not pretend that industrialization was free or would be paid for by enthusiasm alone. If there are no foreign loans and domestic industry is small, then someone has to underconsume today for the sake of factories tomorrow, and in a peasant country that someone is above all the countryside. This explicit arithmetic of the sources of accumulation later became a standard question for the whole of development economics: from which sectors and through which channels is growth financed?

The weak point is the assumption that the state can extract resources through prices for a long time without destroying the very production from which those resources are taken. A peasant for whom it is unprofitable to sell produce at artificially low prices may cut back sales or sowing. This is exactly what Bukharin pointed out: the maximum pumping of funds out of the countryside does not yield the maximum pace, because it undermines the basis of growth. Preobrazhensky's model had no feedback mechanism that would show where extraction becomes destructive.

The second flaw is the very form of an “objective law”. When the distribution of burdens between groups of the population is declared a regularity rather than a decision, it cannot be discussed, revised or limited by rules. Bukharin also noticed the logical side of this problem: in Preobrazhensky the word “primitive” imperceptibly drops out, and the transitional stage is stretched out indefinitely. In hindsight, this construction proved convenient for justifying a policy that the author himself had not formulated: extraction that is called a law requires neither consent nor any check of its consequences.

For the history of planning, what is absent from Preobrazhensky's theory also matters. It lacks a measure of the burden: an indicator that would show what share of a peasant household's income the state is already taking through prices and tariffs, and where the limit lies beyond which the household will begin to contract. Nor is there a procedure for revising the rate of extraction on the basis of facts. Any hidden form of extraction creates this problem: its size is known only to whoever sets the prices, while whoever pays sees only rising prices. That is why an explicit tax or an open subsidy is more verifiable than redistribution hidden in a tariff.

## Debate and criticism

His main opponent was his former co-author. On 12 December 1924 Pravda published an article by Bukharin, which was issued in 1925 as a pamphlet, A New Revelation about the Soviet Economy, or How to Destroy the Worker-Peasant Bloc (Novoe otkrovenie o sovetskoy ekonomike, ili Kak mozhno pogubit' raboche-krest'yanskiy blok), subtitled On the Question of the Economic Justification of Trotskyism (K voprosu ob ekonomicheskom obosnovanii trotskizma). Bukharin argued that a policy of non-equivalent exchange would destroy the alliance of workers and peasants on which the government rested. He also examined the internal contradictions: the non-equivalence of exchange depends not only on the proportion of the peasantry but also on differences in technology and costs.

Later Bukharin published separate Critical Remarks (Kriticheskie zamechaniya) on The New Economics, and the debate took on an academic form. The outcome, however, was decided not in journals but in the party struggle: the Left Opposition was crushed in 1927, the Right in 1928–1929. The debate over pace never became a debate over calculations. Neither side had a quantitative model that would have made it possible to compare the consequences of different rates of extraction, and the line that won was the one backed by the apparatus.

For Western scholarship this debate was opened up by Alexander Erlich in his book The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928 (Harvard, 1960). He presented it as a dispute between two strategies: Bukharin's balanced growth and the rapid development based on centralized accumulation advocated by Preobrazhensky and Trotsky. In 1965 an English translation of The New Economics by Brian Pearce, with an introduction by Alec Nove, was published in Oxford. Since then Preobrazhensky has been discussed not only as an oppositionist but also as one of the early theorists of development economics.

Within Soviet scholarship after 1927 Preobrazhensky's name was banned, and his books were criticized as Trotskyist. The 1932 collection attacking The Decline of Capitalism shows that even after his readmission to the party he could not take part in economic debate on equal terms. A debate that had begun as a theoretical one ended not with the refutation of arguments but with the elimination of the author.

The historian of NEP S. V. Tsakunov describes the dispute between Bukharin and Preobrazhensky as a clash between two currents of official economic thought in the 1920s. Preobrazhensky warned that without decisive redistribution in favour of industry, NEP would lead to the strengthening of the private economy and, in the long run, to the restoration of capitalism. Bukharin responded with a programme of gradual growth of peasant accumulation, cooperation and the state's reliance on the “commanding heights”. Each side saw a real danger, but neither proposed a way of testing its fears against the facts before the dispute was settled politically.

## Legacy today

Preobrazhensky was arrested on 20 December 1936 (according to other sources, on 2 January 1937). The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to be shot, and the sentence was carried out on 13 July 1937. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1988 and in 1990 readmitted to the party. In 2008 the Main Archival Directorate of Moscow republished his works in the volume The New Economics (Theory and Practice): 1922–1928 (Novaya ekonomika (teoriya i praktika): 1922–1928 gg.).

Today his question sounds entirely modern: who actually pays for large development programmes, and through which channels? Hidden redistribution through regulated tariffs, procurement prices, concessions and cross-subsidization exists in market economies too. Preobrazhensky is useful as an author who named this mechanism directly. But his solution — making hidden extraction the main engine of growth and declaring it a law — contradicts the principle of verifiability: when redistribution is hidden in prices, its size can be neither publicly measured nor limited.

For the history of planning, his main lesson is that the debate over pace in the 1920s was conducted without calculation tools and without institutions in which the losing side could remain in the discussion. The inter-branch balance (MOB), which would have made it possible to assess the consequences of different rates of accumulation, was only just emerging in those same years at the Central Statistical Administration (TsSU) and was rejected. Preobrazhensky's proposal remained a powerful formulation of the problem, but not a plan that could be verified.

Finally, Preobrazhensky is useful as a reminder of the price of theoretical clarity without institutions. He accurately described a mechanism by which the state can finance growth, but did not raise the questions of who would limit this mechanism and how, who would measure its consequences, and who would have the right to stop it. In Open Planning these questions come first: goals and the distribution of the burden are set publicly, execution is separated from verification, and hidden redistributions are brought out into an open data column. In this sense our model is not a continuation of Preobrazhensky's ideas but a response to the risks that his theory left unaddressed.

## What open planning takes

- +Explicit accounting of who pays for development. Any redistributive mechanism — a tariff, a regulated price, a concession — is shown in the publication layer as a transfer between groups with an estimate of its size, in the “computed from open data” column.

- +Separating “law” from “decision”. The rate of accumulation and the share of resources directed to development are a decision of the goal-setting circuit, formalized as a legally significant “decision on a goal”, not an objective regularity that cannot be revised.

- +Analysing price instruments as hidden taxes. For each programme, the reproducible calculation layer assesses which groups and territories bear its costs through prices, not only through the budget.

## What we do not repeat

- −Hidden extraction through non-equivalent exchange. Redistribution hidden in prices cannot be measured or limited; it undermines the production from which the resources are taken and contradicts our rule that savings remain with whoever achieved them.

- −Declaring a political choice to be an objective law. Such a formula removes the distribution of burdens from public review and makes it easier to justify coercion.

- −A debate over pace without calculating the consequences. If the alternatives are not calculated on a shared reproducible model, the winner is not the better argument but the stronger apparatus.

## Links between ideas

Whom the author argued with, whose ideas they developed, whom they answered and whose fate they shared. All links are on the shared graph. [Graph of ideas](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/graph)

- [Nikolai Bukharin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bukharin)Direct response →In 1924 Bukharin answered the law of primitive accumulation: non-equivalent exchange would destroy the alliance of workers and peasants.

- [Nikolai Bukharin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bukharin)Practice and institutions →Co-authors of The ABC of Communism (1919), a mass commentary on the party programme.

- [Nikolai Bukharin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bukharin)Shared fate →The accumulation debate ended with both men eliminated: Preobrazhensky was shot in 1937, Bukharin in 1938.

## Timeline

- 1886Born in Bolkhov, Oryol Governorate

- 1919The ABC of Communism, with N. I. Bukharin

- 1920Elected secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) (until March 1921)

- 1923Signed the “Declaration of the 46” and became one of the leaders of the Left Opposition

- 1924Article The Fundamental Law of Socialist Accumulation (Osnovnoy zakon sotsialisticheskogo nakopleniya); Bukharin's reply in Pravda

- 1926Publication of The New Economics: An Attempt at a Theoretical Analysis of the Soviet Economy (Novaya ekonomika. Opyt teoreticheskogo analiza sovetskogo khozyaystva)

- 1927Expelled from the party; in January 1928 exiled to Uralsk

- 1930Readmitted to the party after breaking with the opposition; expelled again in 1933

- 1937Shot by sentence of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR

- 1988Posthumously rehabilitated; readmitted to the party in 1990

## Key works

- 1919 The ABC of Communism (Azbuka kommunizma), with N. I. Bukharin

- 1920 Paper Money in the Epoch of the Proletarian Dictatorship (Bumazhnye den'gi v epokhu proletarskoy diktatury)

- 1924 The Fundamental Law of Socialist Accumulation (Osnovnoy zakon sotsialisticheskogo nakopleniya) // Vestnik Kommunisticheskoy Akademii, book 8

- 1926 The New Economics: An Attempt at a Theoretical Analysis of the Soviet Economy (Novaya ekonomika. Opyt teoreticheskogo analiza sovetskogo khozyaystva). Vol. 1, part 1

- 1931 The Decline of Capitalism: Reproduction and Crises under Imperialism and the World Crisis of 1930–1931 (Zakat kapitalizma: vosproizvodstvo i krizisy pri imperializme i mirovoy krizis 1930–1931 gg.)

## Sources

- Я. С. Кузьминых. [Участие Е. А. Преображенского в экономических дискуссиях 1920-х годов](https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/uchastie-e-a-preobrazhenskogo-v-ekonomicheskih-diskussiyah-1920-h-godov). 2012

- Большая российская энциклопедия. [Преображенский Евгений Алексеевич](https://old.bigenc.ru/economics/text/3175971)

- Н. И. Бухарин. [Новое откровение о советской экономике, или Как можно погубить рабоче-крестьянский блок. К вопросу об экономическом обосновании троцкизма](http://www.illuminats.ru/component/content/article/2178). 1925

- Государственная публичная историческая библиотека России. [Новое откровение о советской экономике… (библиографическая запись издания 1925 года)](http://elib.shpl.ru/ru/nodes/53979-buharin-n-i-novoe-otkrovenie-o-sovetskoy-ekonomike-ili-kak-mozhno-pogubit-raboche-krestyanskiy-blok-k-voprosu-ob-ekonomicheskom-obosnovanii-trotskizma-m-l-1925). 1925

- Е. А. Преображенский (скан в электронной библиотеке ГПИБ). [Новая экономика. Т. 1, ч. 1: опыт теоретического анализа советского хозяйства](http://elib.shpl.ru/ru/nodes/54304). 1926

- Е. А. Преображенский (скан в электронной библиотеке ГПИБ). [Закат капитализма: воспроизводство и кризисы при империализме и мировой кризис 1930–1931 гг.](http://elib.shpl.ru/ru/nodes/54301-preobrazhenskiy-e-a-zakat-kapitalizma-vosproizvodstvo-i-krizisy-pri-imperializme-i-mirovoy-krizis-1930-1931-gg-m-l-1931). 1931

- А. Брейман и др.. [Закат капитализма в троцкистском зеркале (О книге Преображенского Е. «Закат капитализма»)](https://urss.ru/cgi-bin/db.pl?lang=Ru&blang=ru&page=Book&id=28584). 1932

- Википедия. [Преображенский, Евгений Алексеевич](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9,_%D0%95%D0%B2%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87)

- Alexander Erlich. [The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928](https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.4159/harvard.9780674189126/html). 1960

- Recherches Économiques de Louvain. [E. Preobrazhensky. The New Economics. Translated by B. Pearce. With an Introduction by A. Nove. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965 (рецензия)](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/recherches-economiques-de-louvain-louvain-economic-review/article/abs/e-preobrazhensky-the-new-economics-translated-by-b-pearce-with-an-introduction-by-a-nove-oxford-clarendon-press-1965-xx-p-310-p55/516AAAEC7DB68FEF29C98B306C22DAD6). 1965

- Национальная электронная библиотека. [Новая экономика (теория и практика): 1922–1928 гг.](https://rusneb.ru/catalog/000199_000009_004050787/). 2008

- А. В. Шубин. [Введение к «Заметкам экономиста» Н. Бухарина](https://www.1000dokumente.de/index.html?c=dokument_ru&dokument=0031_buc&object=context&l=ru). 2011

Prepared from open sources. Dates, titles and quotations were checked against the source list at the bottom of the page; where sources disagree, the text says so.

Contents

- [Who he is and his times](#context)

- [Main ideas](#ideas)

- [What became of the ideas in practice](#gosplan)

- [What worked and what did not](#worked)

- [Debate and criticism](#critique)

- [Legacy today](#legacy)

- [What open planning takes](#take)

- [What we do not repeat](#avoid)

- [Links between ideas](#links)

- [Timeline](#timeline)

- [Sources](#sources)

All profiles

Founders

- [Gleb Krzhizhanovsky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/krzhizhanovsky)

- [Stanislav Strumilin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/strumilin)

- [Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bazarov-groman)

- [Nikolai Kondratiev](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kondratiev)

Industrialisation

- [Yevgeni Preobrazhensky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/preobrazhensky)

- [Nikolai Bukharin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bukharin)

- [Nikolai Voznesensky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/voznesensky)

Balances and optimal planning

- [Wassily Leontief](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/leontief)

- [Leonid Kantorovich](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kantorovich)

- [Viktor Novozhilov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/novozhilov)

- [Vasily Nemchinov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/nemchinov)

- [Nikolai Fedorenko](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/fedorenko)

Cybernetics and reforms

- [Viktor Glushkov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/glushkov)

- [Evsei Liberman](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/liberman)

- [Stafford Beer](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/beer)

- [Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/cockshott)

Critics

- [Ludwig von Mises](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/mises)

- [Friedrich Hayek](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/hayek)

- [Oskar Lange](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/lange)

- [János Kornai](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kornai)

The administrative market

- [Vitaly Naishul](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/naishul)

- [Simon Kordonsky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kordonsky)

## Related profiles

Nikolai Bukharin

1888–1938 · Theorist of the Bolshevik party, member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1924–1929, full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, chief defender of NEP (New Economic Policy) and balanced growth

Stanislav Strumilin

1877–1974 · Economist and statistician, one of the authors of the first five-year plan, founder of labour economics and time-budget research in the USSR, member of the USSR Academy of Sciences

Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman

1874–1939 and 1874–1940 · Gosplan economists, authors of the “genetic” approach to planning, developers of the first control figures and of the balance method; convicted in the Menshevik Union Bureau trial

Nikolai Kondratiev

1892–1938 · Economist, founder of the Conjuncture Institute, author of the theory of long cycles (Kondratiev waves), critic of the first five-year plan; shot in 1938

Nikolai Voznesensky

1903–1950 · Chairman of the USSR Gosplan in 1938–1941 and 1942–1949, deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) and of the USSR Council of Ministers, member of the State Defence Committee (GKO), full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences