ABSTRACT
Joseph Stalin died on 5 March 1953. This heralded the beginning of a new era in Soviet history, one in which economics was to play a much greater role than during the Stalinist decades. Soviet scholars and administrators produced a number of classification schemes for the various branches of economics concerning the Soviet system. Kantorovich's optimal planning framework was the sole major theoretical invention, and that was an early one. As Ethan Pollock has shown in his study of Soviet post-war Science Wars, Joseph Stalin not only had genuine intellectual pretensions, but was privately scornful of the more extreme views on proletarian science. The older generation of political economists, people whose names are probably best forgotten, were forever stamped by their formative experience of cleansing academia of less than perfect Stalinist scholars. The story of the economist's interaction with economic, political and ideological authorities still remains to be written.
