Adam Smith and His Russian Admirers of the Eighteenth Century

Reproduced here is an essay by Michael P. (Mikhail Pavlovich) Alekseev. In the 1760s two students from Russia, Semyon Efimovich Desnitsky (1740–1789) and Ivan Andreevich Tretyakov (1735–1776), attended Glasgow University, learned directly from Adam Smith, John Millar, and others, returned to Russia, and commenced a tradition of Smithian thought in Russia. Alekseev tells of other Russian Smithians including N. S. Mordinov (1754–1845), Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova (1744–1810), Alexander Romanovich Vorontsov (1741–1805), Semyon Romanovich Vorontsov (1744–1832), Christian von Schlözer (1774–1831), Heinrich Friedrich von Storch (1766–1835), M. A. Balugiansky (1769–1847), Nikolay Turgenev (1789–1871), and the great author Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). Alekseev writes: “After the war of 1812 Adam Smith became extremely popular among the liberal youth of Russia who were organizing secret circles. In endowing the hero of his novel Eugene Onegin with a taste for economic problems and by making him read Adam Smith, Pushkin merely reproduced the actual feature of the time, the writer himself having had the same taste.”