"The Honest Marxist": Yakov Kronrod and the Politics of Cold War Economics in the Post-Stalin USSR

This article examines the career of Yakov Kronrod, a Soviet economic theorist, in the context of the larger transformation of Soviet economics in the post-Stalin period. It argues that Kronrod’s debates with his rivals in the “Mathematical Economics†and “Moscow State University†approaches to economics open a window on how the changing relationship between the state and the profession of economics created new research agendas. The transformation of economics in the post-Stalin period into a “Cold War Science†from an “ideological science†made “policy relevance†increasingly important to Soviet economic practitioners and allowed once ideologically hostile ideas to become central to economics. This case study makes a larger intervention into the history of late Soviet society, arguing that seemingly arcane intellectual conflicts were, in fact, a reflection of extremely contentious political battles and that ideology remained a key site of politics deep into the Brezhnev era.