The editor who built the political economy of socialism as a discipline
Summer 1949: removed from Bolshevik magazine by Central Committee decree for calling Voznesensky's War Economy of the USSR a 'major Marxist-Leninist work.'
Soviet economist, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. As editor-in-chief of Voprosy Ekonomiki (1957–1965), he institutionalized the political economy of socialism as a discipline. His 1929 grain market study provided the theoretical basis for collectivization.
Career Timeline
- 1903Born in Minsk, son of a doctor (Jewish family)
- 1924Graduated from Plekhanov Institute of National Economy
- 1927Joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)
- 1928–1931Head of price sector, Gosplan; helped draft the first and second five-year plans
- 1931–1936Institute of Economics, Communist Academy; head of Soviet trade section
- 1933–1937Head of trade turnover and national economic balance departments, TSUNKHU
- 1939–1949Institute of Economics, USSR Academy of Sciences; editorial board, Bolshevik magazine
- 1949Dismissed from Bolshevik and Higher Party School for praising Voznesensky's book
- 1957–1965Editor-in-chief, Voprosy Ekonomiki
- 1960Elected corresponding member, USSR Academy of Sciences (political economy)
- 1965–1971Director, Institute of Economics, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1971–1997Chief researcher, Institute of Economics
- 1997Died in Moscow; buried at Vagankovo Cemetery
Related historical events
The 1929 Grain Market Study and the Economic Case for Collectivization
When the war scare of late 1927 triggered the so-called 'grain strike' and agricultural procurement collapsed, the 25-year-old economist Gatovsky subjected the market data to cold analysis. Published in 1929, his study demonstrated empirically that the free-market price system was threatening the entire Soviet economy. Over the twelve months from December 1927, free-market grain prices doubled and fodder prices rose by half. While the state supplied flour at controlled prices, peasants were buying flour on the open market at more than the price of the finished loaf, a perverse inversion. They bought cheap state bread and fed it to livestock, and rising fodder prices triggered herd liquidation: cow and horse prices fell by up to 27 per cent, and the milk-to-fodder price ratio plummeted.
Technical crops lost competitiveness too. In the Smolensk region, flax prices relative to rye deteriorated 2.8-fold in a single year, and milk, sugar beet and flax, the main commodities of the non-black-earth zone, all saw profitability collapse against grain. The state was forced to raise procurement prices far beyond planned levels. Rising private agricultural prices drove up urban living costs, and across 45 cities trade markups on farm goods surged from 28.6 to 84 per cent in one year.
Gatovsky drew his decisive argument from marketability by sector. On his figures, kulaks were 5 per cent of the rural population and produced 13 per cent of the grain harvest at a marketability rate of 20 per cent, whereas the socialist sector of state and collective farms held only 1.7 per cent of production share yet delivered the highest marketability at 47.2 per cent. That contrast, in the capacity actually to deliver grain to the cities, became the basis for arguing that the procurement crisis could not be resolved without a transformation through collectivization. His conclusion was stark: 'The pressure of the free market on prices is enormous, and further increases may bring unfavourable consequences for the entire economic system.' The study armed the party's internal debate with empirical proof that the NEP's market mechanisms could not restore the agricultural-industrial balance, and became a decisive theoretical foundation for the turn to wholesale collectivization.