1937–2014
○ Natural causes
An economist who carried price theory into the transition to a market economy
Through the 500 Days programme, he pushed his research on price formation toward a plan for transforming the Soviet economy into a market.
Nikolai Petrakov was a Soviet economist who used mathematical analysis to study price formation and the balancing of costs, output, and incomes in a planned economy. He pursued market mechanisms and price reform, and in 1990 joined Stanislav Shatalin and Grigory Yavlinsky as a co-author of the 500 Days programme. The programme sought to move the Soviet economy toward a market through privatization, price liberalization, and a transfer of authority to the republics, placing Petrakov’s research and policy work at the junction of economic modelling and urgent political choice. He later founded the Institute for Market Problems and led research on market transition and economic policy.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1959Graduated from the Faculty of Economics, Moscow State University
- 1963Earned a Candidate of Economic Sciences degree for research on industrial profitability and pricing
- 1970–1989Professor of economics at Moscow State University
- 1972Earned a Doctor of Economic Sciences degree for research on pricing in a planned economy
- 1984–1990Corresponding member, then full member, of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1990Economic aide to the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, then to the President of the USSR
- 1990Co-author of the Shatalin-Yavlinsky 500 Days programme
- 1990–2014Founder and first director of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for Market Problems
Related historical events
Between the research institute and the policy aide's office
Petrakov's career is characteristic in the way it moved between a research institute and the inner rooms of power. After graduating from the Faculty of Economics of Moscow State University in 1959 he worked at the Institute for Technical-Economic Research, the research institute of the USSR State Planning Committee, and the Central Economic-Mathematical Institute, and in 1972 he defended a doctoral dissertation on prices in the management of economic processes. He became a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1984 and a full member in 1990.
In 1989 he was elected a people's deputy of the USSR and entered political life. He then served as economic aide to the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, a post that carried over into economic aide to the President of the USSR. The work of co-authoring the 500 Days programme belonged to the same period. Alongside the aide's office, in 1990 he took charge of the Institute for Market Problems, created by a decision of the Academy Presidium on the basis of the Central Economic-Mathematical Institute; it began functioning on 1 February 1991, and he directed it until his death in January 2014.
This holding of two posts at once drew criticism. In his memoirs Nikolai Ryzhkov, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, described Petrakov as 'not the strongest and not the brightest economist' and claimed that he persistently persuaded Gorbachev that his own government was 'conservative and anti-perestroika'. The combined record of running an institute and serving in the Kremlin as an aide shows how, in the last years of perestroika, the making of policy was entangled between the academic world and the party and state apparatus. After the dissolution of the USSR he remained director of the Institute for Market Problems and, as a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed the economics section of its Division of Social Sciences. From March 1994 to January 1996 he was a deputy of the first State Duma of the Russian Federation.
He was born in Moscow on 1 March 1937, died in the same city on 9 January 2014, and was buried at the Troekurovskoye cemetery.