Founder of CEMI and architect of SOFE: the mathematician who tried to redesign the planned economy
Late 1960s: CEMI forecast Soviet growth would slow. Gosplan's chairman refused to send it to the Politburo. To avoid charges of 'ideological heresy,' the authors burned the report on a bonfire in Moscow's Neskuchny Garden.
The economist who institutionalized mathematical optimization in Soviet central planning. Appointed in 1963 on Nemchinov's recommendation as CEMI's first director, he led it for 22 years and built the theoretical foundations of SOFE, extending Kantorovich's linear programming into a nationwide planning architecture. As Academician-Secretary of the Economics Department (1971–1986), he elevated mathematical economics to an official agenda of Soviet economic science and served as scientific director of Gosplan's Automated System of Planned Calculations. A WWII chemical-troops officer who reached Berlin, he won the USSR State Prize in 1970.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1949–1956Assistant, docent, professor, head of department of chemical industry economics, MITKhT
- 1953–1958Prorector, Moscow Institute of Fine Chemical Technology
- 1962Corresponding member, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1963–1985Founder and first director, CEMI
- 1964Full member (academician), USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1965–1988Founding editor-in-chief, Economics and Mathematical Methods
- 1967–1983Member, Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1971–1986Academician-Secretary, Department of Economics, USSR Acad. of Sciences
- 1987–2006Advisor to the Presidium, USSR/Russian Academy of Sciences
Related historical events
Defending SOFE and the Campaign of the 1970s
The System of Optimal Functioning of the Economy (SOFE) that Fedorenko set out in his 1968 book On the Development of a System of Optimal Functioning of the Economy sought a path by which the economy could move to a new economic management mechanism. The category of the socio-economic optimum stood at its centre, and long-range planning, decentralization of economic decisions, tax regulation and optimal pricing were treated alongside it. He held that the constraint of aggregate resources and the satisfaction of the population's needs should be the starting point of planning: in his diagnosis social needs under socialism permanently outran production capacity, and an optimal plan was a plan for the assortment of goods that more fully satisfied the population's needs.
Where the concept demanded a real reorganization of the central planning bodies, it provoked bureaucratic resistance. In 1974 the journal Planned Economy published an article under an anonymous byline on American scholarship about the Soviet economy that accused Fedorenko's name of being used in anti-Soviet propaganda and asserted that his views had met "legitimate scientific criticism". In a letter to the party Central Committee dated 1 November that year Fedorenko protested that such methods were unacceptable in the discussion of scientific questions and described the editors' attitude as a collective attack on the economic-mathematical school.
The pressure widened to the institutional level. On 1 October 1974 an enlarged board meeting of Gosplan criticized some scholars for borrowing theories uncritically from "the arsenal of bourgeois science", and the following February officials at the level of Central Committee department heads observed that the editors of Planned Economy had failed to distinguish Soviet scholars' criticism from anti-Soviet interpretations, while advising Fedorenko to write articles in the press "exposing the tricks of bourgeois propaganda". In May 1975 the Moscow city party committee concluded that CEMI's selection and placement of cadres was deficient, criticizing the institute's leadership for proposing untested methodologies and for being passive in criticizing bourgeois economic concepts.
The measures that followed were aimed at the institute itself. In 1983 K. U. Chernenko criticized CEMI's work as displaying shortcomings that were to some degree present in other scientific institutions as well; as a result the institute was split in two and many researchers moved to other jobs. Fedorenko called this a "massacre". SOFE was realized only in part, and even scholars of the reform era judged that not everything planned had come to pass.