1977–
A quantitative reinterpreter of Russian economic history
His 2021 study showed that regional differences in famine mortality were more closely associated with ethnic bias than with food productivity.
Andrei Markevich is an economic historian who reconstructs Russian economic history through quantitative evidence and institutional analysis. His work examines the state, markets, industrialization, and planning in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union over long time spans, and he has taught and conducted research at the New Economic School in Moscow. A 2021 study with Natalya Naumenko and Nancy Qian found that the high mortality of Ukrainians during the 1932–33 famine cannot be explained by food production alone, linking it to ethnically biased procurement policy and migration restrictions. The study uses large regional datasets to connect the famine’s economic mechanisms with the responsibility of state policy.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1994–1999Student, History Faculty, Moscow State University
- 2002Candidate of Historical Sciences, Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences
- 2005–2007Postdoctoral fellow, Department of Economics, University of Warwick
- 2011National Prize in Applied Economics
- 2012–Professor and Head of Institutional Economics, New Economic School
- 2021–Associate Editor, Economic Journal
Related historical events
Studies of the 1932-33 famine and the scholarly dispute
Of Markevich's work, the most widely discussed beyond academic circles concerns the 1932-33 Soviet famine, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor. In a 2021 study written with Natalya Naumenko and Nancy Qian, he analyzed regional mortality, production and procurement data quantitatively to estimate the ethnic distribution of famine deaths. The paper argues that of roughly seven million famine deaths across the Soviet Union, about 40 per cent were ethnic Ukrainians. It also notes that in non-famine years Ukrainian mortality was actually lower than in the rest of the Soviet Union (18 per 1,000 against 22 per 1,000), yet in 1933, when mortality in Belarus and Russia rose to 30 per 1,000, it jumped to 60 per 1,000 in Ukraine, with famine mortality four to six times higher there than in Russia. The finding that regions with larger Ukrainian population shares faced higher procurement quotas and received fewer tractors supports the authors' reading that ethnic discrimination operated across the board under central planning.
The study clashes with earlier famine research at several points. The authors credit Davies and Wheatcroft with correcting production data, but criticize them for ignoring disaggregated mortality, production and procurement data and for failing to evaluate their hypotheses statistically. Davies and Wheatcroft hold that the famine was man-made but unintended and state that they found no evidence of a genocide programme against Ukraine, while Michael Ellman concludes that the Stalin leadership's conduct constituted crimes against humanity but that the genocide charge depends on definition and lacks proof of specific intent. In the wider field, scholars broadly agree the famine was man-made while dividing, along Russian, Ukrainian and Western lines, over intent and the genocide label. A condition of that debate is that most scholars who reject the genocide characterization still do not absolve Stalin or the Soviet regime of responsibility for the deaths, regarding the policies as ultimately criminal in nature. Markevich's quantitative work belongs to this dispute as an attempt to test the ethnic bias in mortality against regional data. He received the national prize in applied economics in 2012 for a study of Russian national income in 1913-1928 written with Mark Harrison, initiated the Electronic Archive of Russian Historical Statistics with Heise Kessler, and has been an associate editor of the Economic Journal since 2021.