1950–
Economic historian who argued partial reform would only destroy the planning system
'Analyses of "Gorbachev's economists" never mention the words "charlatan" or "ignoramus."'
A Soviet-born economist who emigrated to the United States, trained at Novosibirsk University and the University of Pennsylvania. In his 1988 article 'Lessons of the 1965 Soviet Economic Reform,' he argued that resistance from central ministries and Gosplan to the Kosygin reform was not mere bureaucratic self-interest but a rational recognition that partial market reform would destroy the central planning system without putting any workable alternative in its place. Together with Michael Ellman he edited The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System; this systemic incompatibility thesis became a key argument in the historiographical debate over why Soviet reforms consistently failed.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1973Diploma in Economics, Novosibirsk University
- 1985Ph.D. in Economics, University of Pennsylvania
- 1984–2002Founder and President, Command Economies Research, Inc.; contract research for US DoD and CIA
- 1987–Assistant → Associate → Professor of Economics, Haverford College
- 1988"Lessons of the 1965 Soviet Economic Reform," Soviet Studies
- 1992/1998Co-editor with Michael Ellman, The Disintegration / The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System
- 2008"Soviet Economic Reform" entry, New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics
Related historical events
Reassessing Sovietology’s failures of diagnosis
In his 1996 draft, “Economists and the Collapse,” Kontorovich treated Sovietologists’ failure to foresee the dissolution of the USSR not simply as a forecasting error but as a failure to diagnose observable economic tendencies. He cautioned that judgments about forecasting errors depend on the explanation of the collapse one accepts, and acknowledged that factors outside economists’ usual field of observation, such as rulers’ personalities and political reforms, made the timing difficult to predict. At the same time, he criticized Western forecasts of the 1970s and 1980s for overlooking the long-term slowdown in growth and argued that analysts had misjudged both the destructive potential of economic reforms and the weight of the military sector. The presence of exogenous political factors, he maintained, did not absolve economists of responsibility for systematic misdiagnosis. In a follow-up study published in 2001, he compared Western analyses of Soviet reform with information that became available during the opening and disintegration of the USSR, including interviews and memoirs by Soviet participants. The article questioned the conventional assumption that the economy was paralyzed or declining when Gorbachev adopted his 1987 reform, and examined interpretations that located the impetus for reform in international security and military rivalry rather than domestic crisis. This work thus extended his critique from the institutional operation of reform to the evidence and forecasting methods of Western scholarship on the Soviet economy.