1929–2016
○ Natural causes
Soviet economist who identified two incompatible regulators, plan and quasi-market, as the core contradiction of the Kosygin reform
"An enterprise cannot simultaneously have two heterogeneous regulators. Just as a car cannot have two drivers with two steering wheels," summing up the failure of the Kosygin reform in The Planned System in Retrospect (2000).
A Soviet and Russian economist, Olsevich graduated from Moscow State University's economics faculty and taught political economy at the Urals Polytechnic Institute. From 1965 until his death he worked at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he led the sector for critical study of foreign economic theories; in his later years he concentrated on the theory of economic transformation and the history of Russian economic thought. In The Planned System in Retrospect (2000), co-authored with Paul Gregory, he identified the core contradiction of the 1965 Kosygin reform as the incompatibility of two heterogeneous regulators, the directive plan and the quasi-market, within a single enterprise, founding the 'two regulators' school of reform analysis.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1951–1957Lecturer in political economy, Urals Polytechnic Institute
- 1957–1962Editor and deputy head, economics section, Foreign Literature Publishing House
- 1962–1965Senior researcher, IMEMO (Institute of World Economy and International Relations)
- 1965–1968Head of world prices sector, Institute of Economics, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1968–1992Head of sector for critical study of foreign economic theories, Institute of Economics
- 1969–2016Professor, Moscow State University economics faculty
- 1992–2016Chief research fellow, Institute of Economics, Russian Academy of Sciences
Related historical events
The scientific and technological revolution and the theory of infra-industry
From the late 1980s, Olsevich analyzed how the scientific and technological revolution was changing productive forces and socioeconomic relations. In a 1989 study he introduced the concepts of “infra-industry” and “infra-systems.” He defined an infra-system as a functionally integrated subsystem that links distinct forms of production while becoming organically embedded in them, and infra-industry as a new historical form of productive forces in which local machinery and production units are joined into a single technological chain. He used the electricity network as a central example, alongside transport, communications, water and heating systems as “cross-cutting” infrastructures linking different sectors. The scientific and technological revolution, he argued, gave new forms and fields of operation to infrastructures that had already been developing. The combination of electricity, gas and water supply, road and pipeline transport, and communications could support small and medium-sized firms and individual producers within interconnected production, weakening the boundary between manufacturing and services. Production could therefore become more socially integrated while also being distributed among smaller units. Olsevich argued that a plural economy could ease technological stagnation by using planning for large systems and market mechanisms in rapidly changing production, while supporting diverse forms of ownership. He linked excessive Soviet centralization to a bureaucratic allocation system rooted in long-term confrontation with the West and the mobilization of national resources. At the same time, he argued that cumbersome centralized planning could not keep pace with computerization and changing demand, and that workers’ motivation had declined.