(Not) Looking for a Common Model of Socialist Economics: The Transnational Network of Socialist Economists of the 1920s

Regular changes in the Soviet economic experience until 1929 initially allowed communist movements outside the Soviet Union to develop their own interpretations of a socialist economy. Until the adoption of the first five-year plan in 1929, the Soviet Union successively experienced wartime communism and the New Economic Policy (NEP). In this process, the emergence of a Soviet economic model did not depend solely on the situation in the Soviet Union but was also influenced by the analysis of Weimar Germany’s economic context.Footnote ¹⁰ According to Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, the Soviet Union in its early days developed its economy under the strong influence of ‘the demise of the liberal world economic order’, to which it first had to react, rather than investing in shaping an alternative economic theory.Footnote ¹¹

The political orientation of the Soviet experts who elaborated economic discourses also framed the possibility of a genuine Soviet economic model, which would be acknowledged on a pan-European level by the communist parties. Menshevik economists dominated the Gosplan and other economic institutions of the new Soviet state until their replacement by Bolshevik ‘red experts’ in the 1930s.Footnote ¹² The international influence of ‘Stalin’s economist’, Eugene Varga was no sufficient factor to homogenise socialist economics within the socialist world-system.Footnote ¹³ Therefore, during the 1920s, there emerged no unambiguous body of knowledge sustaining a unified curriculum in the political economy of socialism, neither one that was taught in state-led schools in the Soviet Union nor one in party-led or party-near institutions in western and central European capitalist countries. This was also due to the reluctance of socialist intellectuals to develop a political economy of socialism describing the laws under which socialist economics would operate in a socialist country.Footnote ¹⁴ First Rosa Luxemburg, and later Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, refused to theorise a political economy of socialism until the end of the 1920s. This prevented the Soviet Union from legitimising by means of a scientific argument its own economic approach on a European scale. As long as political economy was considered a capitalist science, Marxist economic discourses were to focus merely on its criticism to accompany its disappearance.Footnote ¹⁵ Under these conditions, as Moshe Lewin put it, ‘the industrialization drive, especially during the very first plans that shaped Russia’s economic system, was accompanied by an astonishingly inadequate development of theory’.Footnote ¹⁶ Several textbooks were nevertheless published in the 1920s, such as The ABC of Communism and The Economics of the Transitional Period by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, or Preobrazhensky’s The New Economics. They proved difficult to access for communist movements outside the Soviet Union, which is why Varga’s more approachable lessons on the crisis of capitalism, published in the International Press Correspondence in the 1930s, often remained the sole medium for economics teachers in western and central Europe to indirectly access them.

This delay in the theorisation of socialist economics in the Soviet Union reinforced the difficulty for communist movements outside the country to recruit genuine Marxist economists. It also accounted for different content in the economics classes taught in the Soviet Union and in western and central European communist milieus (on the use of Marx’s ‘law of value’, the role of the state in a socialist economy or the relationship between socialism and underdevelopment), as will be explained in the second section. The two largest European communist parties outside the Soviet Union, the German and the French party, hence had to empower generalist intellectuals, often philosophers, with the task of taking on the exegesis and teaching of Marxism in economics. A handful of them constituted the first network of economists within the socialist world-system, relying on their pan-European political and personal connections to develop classes in a discipline in which they were not trained experts. Whereas the economic theory of socialism was taught in state- and union-led schools in the Soviet Union, the German and French communist economists had to deliver classes to a broad audience spread within an imbalanced three-pillar teaching system, specific to the western and central European communist counter-society. This system was already well developed at the end of the 1920s and included party schools,Footnote ¹⁷ union schools and workers’ universities (in France) or so-called Marxist schools (in Germany).Footnote ¹⁸

Confronted with a cycle of mutation (post-war recovery), crisis (hyperinflation) and survival of the capitalist system, German communist intellectuals experienced in the interwar period various incentives to develop their own economic thought in the socialist world-system. Three sets of incentives forced the German communist party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands; KPD) to develop its own economic analyses, allowing it to establish itself as a second, yet relatively autonomous, pole in the pan-European networks elaborating socialist economics in the interwar period. The first set is an academic one. The party intellectuals mandated by the KPD to teach the economic works of Marx, Engels and Lenin stood in direct competition with the social-democratic economics professors at German universities. The latter, who had held a prominent position in the field of economics in Europe since the late nineteenth century, only ‘claimed to teach Marxism’,Footnote ¹⁹ according to the KPD. The party primarily attempted to refute them within the German academic milieu, rather than looking for a theoretical dialogue with contemporary Soviet economists. The second incentive are the economic crises that forced the KPD to provide potential voters with an analysis of the economic situation in Weimar Germany. Finally, the German parliament passed a law in 1920 establishing factory councils (Betriebsräte), which promoted participation of workers’ representatives in the management of capitalist firms and required their training in the analysis of the capitalist economy.Footnote ²⁰ The Berlin Marxist Workers’ School (Marxistische Arbeiterschule; MASCH), which embodied the party-near yet independent workers’ educational system, devoted specific courses to the workers’ representatives elected in factory councils since its establishment in 1926. In these courses, the specific characteristics of the political economy of socialism were, however, only approached through the criticism of the so-called economic democracy promoted by social democrats.

If the Soviet experience did not constitute the undisputed model of a communist economy in the interwar period, it was because Germany remained at the heart of scientific debates in economics. Nevertheless, a pan-European circulation of economic knowledge and teachers was established between these two poles of the socialist world-system. The Comintern’s magazine, International Press Correspondence, was the first medium to disseminate key Soviet economic texts in Germany (and, via the German channel, in central and western Europe), in particular those written by Eugene Varga. In addition, the KPD relied on the Office for Foreign Science and Technology (OFST), which was founded in 1921 within the economic mission of the Soviet embassy in Germany.Footnote ²¹ The OFST aimed to establish relations between German and western European scientists on one side and scientific institutions and Soviet intellectuals on the other. It enabled German communist intellectuals to acquaint themselves with the Soviet scientific production via its publishing house and the translation of Russian texts, until it was dissolved in 1922. The German students at the International Leninist School in Moscow, which opened in 1926, also constituted a pool of potential teachers who were familiar with Soviet scientific debates; the KPD was willing to exploit their contributions to make up for its shortage of qualified economics teachers, like it did at the occasion of the opening of a branch of the MASCH in Bochum in March 1931.Footnote ²²

Eventually, by the end of the 1920s, information about the Soviet economy as an applied form of the political economy of socialism was accessible to the workers in Germany and France in the form of factual reports on the implementation of the first five-year plan. The classes did not aim to benchmark the Soviet experience as encompassing all of socialist economics. The indigenous western European analysis of the economic crisis of the capitalist economy, mainly elaborated by German communist intellectuals, remained dominant in the teaching material for French and German workers, since it described a reality they lived in and were able to understand. It was nevertheless supplemented by some sessions on the political economy of socialism that emphasised the specific character of the economic transformation happening in the Soviet Union.

Polemics of the 1930s: Is the Plan the Lowest Common Denominator of Socialist Economics?

Outside the Soviet Union, the intellectual matrix of the reflection on the political economy of socialism was found in the various branches of the MASCH, which spread from Berlin to almost thirty other German cities between 1926 and 1931. The MASCH and its French pendant, the workers’ university, enjoyed great support among prominent progressive intellectuals. Hermann Duncker, who was already famous as the ‘itinerant teacher’ of the German Social-Democratic Party before the First World War, became responsible for education within the KPD in the interwar period and cofounded the MASCH, where he attracted numerous intellectuals such as Albert Einstein and Walter Gropius. Among its economics teachers the school counted Eduard Alexander, a former economic journalist and KPD member of the German parliament since 1928; Edwin Hörnle, a specialist in agricultural questions; and the trained economist and party member Dr Jürgen Kuczynski, after he had returned in 1929 from his research years in the United States. These intellectuals disseminated throughout Europe an economic theory different from the one that was being developed in the Soviet Union at the same time.

An article published in 1943 in the Soviet philosophical and socio-economic journal Under the Banner of Marxism sheds light on the differences in the economic content taught in the Soviet Union and in non-Soviet communist circles in the interwar period. According to the article, which sparked a vivid discussion among western economists after it was translated into English in the New York Times and the American Economic Review in 1944, two elements distinguished socialist economics elaborated within the Soviet Union from its non-Soviet interpretations.Footnote ²³ The first is related to the organisation of the curriculum. In the Soviet Union, ‘the most important topic in the teaching of political economy is, of course, the section on the socialist system’,Footnote ²⁴ whereas western and central European communist economists focused on criticising the political economy of capitalism and left insights about the Soviet economy for the end-of-term classes. Correlatively, Marx’s law of value constituted the core of economic knowledge taught in western and central European communist circles. Its teaching occupied most of the economics class of Jacques Solomon, who was one of the main economics teachers of the French communist party (Parti communiste français; PCF) at the French workers’ university, between 1934 and the outbreak of the war. The law of value indeed explains how the capitalist economy works and how workers were being exploited by capitalists. It eventually disappeared from the teaching of socialist economics in the Soviet Union in the interwar period, mostly for political reasons, distinguishing two different bodies of knowledge about economics in the socialist world-system.Footnote ²⁵

In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, two interpretations of Marx’s historicist analysis of economic systems conflicted. Economists such as Bogdanov and Skvortsov-Stepanov, as well as the old Marxists, constituted the ‘genetic school’. They interpreted capitalism as a step in the historical evolution toward communism and, therefore, acknowledged the existence of economic laws – among them the law of value – and their usefulness, once adapted to the context of a socialist state transitioning towards a socialist economy. Despite their political opposition to Bukharin, these economists became associated with him and purged by the Party.Footnote ²⁶ Young Soviet economists, who originally relied on Bukharin’s interpretation, such as N. Osinsky, developed a systemic understanding of capitalism. The latter was strictly historicised and considered an isolated system in history. Therefore, no economic continuity was to be drawn between the capitalist economy and the Soviet society of the interwar period. Economic laws, such as the law of value, did not apply in socialist economics. The notion of ‘value’ had to disappear as an account unit and to be seen solely as the outcome of social practices.Footnote ²⁷

On the contrary, the law of value remained crucial to non-Soviet Marxist economists in Europe during the interwar period. When commenting on the 1943 article, Oskar Lange explained,

Despite persisting misalignment on the economic tools used for implementing calculation and planning in socialist economics, Soviet economists came closer to their western and central European counterparts after 1943. Both groups were able to read and comment on each other in a pan-European discussion during the whole Stalinist period, even though the political and economic contexts in which these economists were embedded strongly diverged and accounted for differences in the teaching of the political economy of socialism. Jacques Solomon emphasised the importance of classes on political economy and pointed out that they should aim at a ‘scientific study, in relation to the experienced reality [of the students], but [are] not designed to be transformed into a presentation on agitation’.Footnote ²⁹ Workers’ schools close to the western European communist parties in the 1930s were to train as many workers as possible in economic issues using a communist approach, which was characterised by being both practical and theoretical, but above all connected to the national economic contexts.

Slowly but surely, the number of economics teachers increased in western Europe during the interwar period. Recruitment and training, however, remained a problem, especially because Germany played a pivotal role in it, which was impeded by the takeover of the Nazi regime after 1933. The most highly educated teachers often originally graduated in philosophy or law at the university. Considered as intellectuals, who could have an autonomous understanding of Marx’s work, they were the first ones made responsible for advanced economics courses, including the teaching of the most complex texts (Marx’s Capital, for example) and for the courses on Soviet planning. Whereas the most prominent economics teachers of the MASCH were in their late forties when the school expanded around 1929–30 (Richard Oehring was 39, Edwin Hoernle 46, Eduard Alexander 49 and Hermann Duncker 56), their French counterparts were much younger when the workers’ university was established in 1932 (Jacques Solomon was 24, Georges Politzer and Victor Fay 29 and Georges Cogniot 31). While Hoernle was a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern and had visited the Soviet Union, like R. Oehring, Georges Cogniot was the only French teacher to have been to Moscow. They trained a second group of teachers, several of them former students, who were gradually put in charge of the ever-increasing number of students attending introductory courses on the political economy of socialism.Footnote ³⁰ The significant presence of female teachers in economics classes, such as Lore Seligmann, Anna Keller, Irma Meidner and Gertrud Baarß,Footnote ³¹ is also worth noting in Germany.

At the workers’ university in France, the teachers in charge of economics classes relied heavily on the academic adaptation of Soviet theoretical thought carried out in Berlin. Jacques Solomon, Georges Cogniot and Victor Fay established a transnational circulation of communist economic ideas compatible with western European workers’ expectations.Footnote ³² Lacking an academic culture in economics, Jacques Solomon (who held a PhD in physics) and Georges Cogniot (who was a literature professor and philosopher) offered their own interpretations of Marxism applied to economics in their introductory classes. As they both spoke German, they complemented it with theoretical references, pedagogical scenarios and lesson plans, which they borrowed from their German colleagues. The MASCH booklets constituted their primary source and had been ordered by the agitprop section of the French communist party from the KPD since 1931.Footnote ³³ Georges Cogniot went to Germany himself and later stressed the importance of this trip for his teaching:

The economic knowledge disseminated by the communist movement to French workers in the interwar period was the result of a transnational circulation. It started with an analysis of the situation in the industrialised countries based on Marx and Engels’ works, was updated in the Soviet Union (through the theoretical contribution of Lenin and Varga, but also Sokol’nikov and Bukharin for the NEP and later Stalin), reappropriated by German intellectuals and then disseminated via Comintern networks. This circulation allowed for the progressive hybridisation of socialist economics between western Europe and the Soviet Union, which shaped a politically based pan-European space of economic thought.

In 1931, the Executive Committee of the Comintern clarified the key position entrusted to German intellectuals in this process. They had to associate broader circles of Marxist economists in central and northern Europe to this circulation and to ‘raise the popularisation of the socialist construction in the Soviet Union to a new level’. According to the Executive Committee, they should distance themselves from the mere comparison of the Soviet Union’s success with the crisis of capitalism in Germany and concentrate on describing to the workers what they were to expect, from an economic point of view, in case of the establishment of a communist regime in Germany.Footnote ³⁵ To this end, the Comintern urged the communist parties of France, Czechoslovakia and Scandinavia to delegate their intellectuals to German party schools so as to homogenise high-level knowledge on the evolution of the Soviet economy and therefore on the political economy of socialism.Footnote ³⁶ At the same time, however, Walter Gollmick, the KPD delegate for education, agitation and propaganda, deplored ‘a great shortage of trained theoreticians and a lack of a good political economy textbook’, as well as the fact that ‘the brother parties failed to delegate their intellectuals or delayed their delegation with unrealistic demands’, which according to Gollmick ‘[were] not right. There the internationalism goes too far’.Footnote ³⁷

In 1929–30 the Soviet Union abandoned the NEP and shifted towards central planning and an economic system based on state-led planned industrialisation and the collectivisation of agriculture. It then tried to impose its new definition of the political economy of socialism on a pan-European level. However, the pivotal forces of economic knowledge diffusion in western and central Europe, the German KPD and the MASCH, were not ready to shift away from their focus on providing workers with tools to criticise the political economy of capitalism in which they were living. They kept conveying scarce descriptive insights on the realisations of the first five-year plan in the Soviet Union. In 1933, the KPD and the MASCH were dissolved by the Nazi regime. French intellectuals, who had always relied on their German counterparts for elaborating their curriculum, kept teaching this imbalanced German-influenced version of socialist economics because of their inability to align with Soviet expectations.

During the whole interwar period, the economics classes of the German and later French Marxist schools remained organised into three main learning blocks. Students were first introduced to the study of the political economy through the study of its critique of the capitalist system. They then focused on the denunciation of the social-democratic concept of ‘economic democracy’,Footnote ³⁸ which covered the denunciation of the shortcomings of workers’ participation in factory councils in Germany as well as the communist criticism of the planist movement in the 1930s in France.Footnote ³⁹ The political economy of socialism was the subject of the last part of the courses, at the end of each term. Economics teachers at the Marxist schools in France and Germany used it to present – in broad strokes – the model of the centrally planned Soviet economy, while emphasising at the same time how it was not suited to their country. On the contrary, in the Soviet Union, examples of the economic changes happening in the country were studied in every lesson after the exposition of the theoretical point.Footnote ⁴⁰ Soviet-style central planning was neither a distant horizon nor a mere illustration of the political economy of socialism, but its real-existing manifestation.

The analysis of the Soviet economy as a model for a new political economy was therefore not within the reach of most western and central European workers nor of their economics teachers. Almost all classes on the Soviet economy or the five-year plan were taught in Germany by Richard Oehring alone.Footnote ⁴¹ As an economic journalist, Oehring had travelled to the Soviet Union in 1922 and was a founding member of Arplan in 1931, an association of German intellectuals studying the Soviet planned economy. Together with another economist, Arvid Harnack, Oehring organised the first study trip of Arplan members in the Soviet Union in 1932, where he gathered first-hand information on the Soviet economic model.Footnote ⁴² The theoretical work on the political economy of socialism in a European capitalist context remained in the hands of a small group of teachers (four to five in France, about ten in Germany). Even though interest in the economic experience happening in the Soviet Union existed in western and central European communist milieus in the 1920s and 1930s, an actual and lasting impact of Soviet knowledge about socialist economics remained hampered by the short-lasting existence of the institutions responsible for publicising it outside the Soviet Union, such as the OFST (1921–2), or Arplan, which was shut down by the Nazis in 1933.

The participation of central European Marxists in these educational systems is more difficult to analyse in detail. Nonetheless, Polish and Hungarian economists sympathetic to a structuralist or Marxist analysis of central and eastern Europe’s economic situation in the interwar period, or members of the communist parties in their countries, were actually embedded in the pan-European discussion of socialist economics. The legacy of the intellectual networks of the Austrian Hungarian Empire accounted for a transnational sphere of economic debate that connected Czech, Polish and Hungarian economists with the Austrian and the German economic schools since the 1920s. This circulation did not consist in the mere transfer of knowledge elaborated in Austrian or German universities to their central European counterparts, but the latter were able to influence economists in Vienna and Berlin.Footnote ⁴³

Two sets of debates involved Marxist economists in central Europe at the time. They allowed them to demonstrate their autonomy from the Comintern and their ability to contribute to socialist economics, which did not take the Soviet Union of the 1920s or 1930s as the essential benchmark. The crucial issues for central European Marxist economists in the interwar period were the definition of (under)development and enforcing the model character of their region at a global scale to develop a theory for overcoming it. Their intervention in pan-European economic debates was first initiated by an article published in 1920 by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. Mises argued that a centrally planned economy is unable to perform economic calculation and therefore to allocate resources in a rational way that enables economic actors to achieve the objectives set for them by the planning authorities. Mises was refuted by Polish Marxist economist Oskar Lange during what is known as the ‘socialist calculation debate’. In 1936 Lange published On the Economic Theory of Socialism, in which he legitimised the use of market tools in socialist planning, notably the setting of prices by a process of trial and error on a market.Footnote ⁴⁴ Although Lange became one of the most influential Marxist economists in the socialist bloc after the Second World War, he developed his theories in Great Britain and in the United States in the 1930s, with the support of a Rockefeller fellowship, after earning his PhD in economics from Kraków University in 1928.Footnote ⁴⁵ Lange’s example proves how embedded central European Marxist economists were in a pan-European network that linked them primarily to Western economics.

In the 1930s, the second set of debates that helped elaborate a model for economic development under socialism was the issue of market fluctuations, which became a crucial topic when capitalist countries, including central European countries, were hit by the Great Depression. In this regard, Polish economist Ludwik Landau constituted, according to Oskar Lange himself in the mid-1930s, ‘the bridge for the progressive intelligentsia to anti-capitalist critique and to the Popular Front’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Małgorzata Mazurek’s study on Landau’s statistical work in the interwar period shows that, by distancing himself from the highly political discussion about the nature of the capitalist crisis elaborated by Varga in the Soviet Union and circulated to communist parties through the International Press Correspondence, Landau was able to develop a Marxist analysis of socialist economics that did not take the Soviet experience as a model. Landau and his colleagues at the Central Institute for Statistics in Poland were deeply influenced by Marxism but also the German historical school of economics. Therefore, if Landau advocated industrial development under state planning in the 1930s, he emphasised the necessity of Poland keeping an equidistant position between rich and poor countries. Mazurek rightfully qualifies his work as using ‘the epistemic potential of Eastern Europe – its liminal status – to change scholarly perception of the world’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The theory developed by central European Marxist economists such as Landau put forward the ‘betweenness’ of these countries – located between the Soviet Union and western European capitalist countries – ‘not just as another imposed topic but also as an epistemic resource’ in the field of economics.Footnote ⁴⁸ These scholars managed to do so because their work accompanied the evolution of central European governments that looked inwards, rather than to Western or Soviet models, for a way out of the economic crisis and shifted ‘from self-perceived deficiency to difference’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Like the French and German communist economists, central European Marxist economists of the interwar period showed initiative in defining a body of socialist economic knowledge in a European capitalist context and challenged the internationalisation of the Soviet experiment as reference for socialist economics.

1945–55: The Incomplete Decoupling from Pan-European Intellectual Networks

Pan-European intellectual exchanges took a new turn after 1945. The dissolution of the Comintern and the establishment of an East–West Cold War narrative associated pan-European discussions with an attempt by the newly established people’s democracies to evade East–East socialist debates trying to universalise the Soviet economic model. However, the Soviet Union experienced difficulties in disrupting the former autonomy of central and eastern European countries in the discussion of socialist economics acquired in pan-European interwar networks. First, the central planning model remained challenged as the core characteristic of socialist economics. Women from the East German trade union FDGB’s working group on the relationship between the domestic and the national economy could, for example, say in 1946 that ‘people still mistakenly believe that planning is synonymous with a socialist economy’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Second, until the mid-1950s, Soviet experts had to deal with the disorganisation of the academic milieu in these countries. Because of the repression of the communist movements by fascist regimes, most governments in the people’s democracies found it difficult to recruit communist economists after 1945. Several major theoreticians and teachers had died during the war (R. Oehring, E. Alexander, J. Solomon, L. Landau) and the number of professionals trained in Marxist schools in the interwar period was not sufficient to cover the needs of the new socialist bureaucracies in state-led enterprises and in the universities.

In the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, the debates over the transformation of the curriculum in economics at the university in 1947–8 highlighted this shortcoming. A leading role in reorganising this curriculum was given to professors who held teaching positions in the interwar period even though they were not members of the KPD or, although party-members, had gone into exile in capitalist countries, like Jürgen Kuczynski. Their colleagues who had experienced exile or war captivity in the Soviet Union were not sent back to East Germany until the turn of the 1950s to overcome increasing difficulties in economics faculties. In 1955, for example, the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands; SED) deplored that Professor Fritz Behrens’s departure from the economics faculty of the University of Leipzig ‘caused such difficulties for the Institute of Political Economy there that it cannot fulfil its scientific and educational tasks at the faculty’.Footnote ⁵¹ This dependence on a few professors and their PhD students, who had to make up for the shortages in teaching staff by taking on most of the classes, gave the former a huge intellectual influence until the early 1950s, when official programmes started to be implemented in East Germany and in the other people’s democracies.Footnote ⁵² These shortages were the symptom of a relative difficulty to politicise economics faculties in the immediate aftermath of the war. In 1951, for example, the dean of the economics faculty of Berlin, Professor Kuczynski, informed the Ministry for Education that only 50 per cent of the students in the final year had managed to complete their mandatory internship and that half of them did it in a capitalist enterprise in West Berlin. Although most students did not acquire the expected skills in managing state-led enterprises, Kuczynski was allowed to graduate each student who completed their internship. Pragmatism and the need to train economists, even though their training was not fully targeted towards enforcing the transition of East German enterprises to a socialist governance, was considered a lesser evil by party and state authorities.Footnote ⁵³ Considering these practical difficulties and the fact that in 1948, 80 per cent of the East German state enterprises’ managers had only received a lower secondary education (Volksschule), the first teachers in East German economics faculties after the Second World War promoted the continued teaching of a critical political economy of capitalism. The state and party authorities considered it more urgent to train managers in the basics of the functioning of the national economy at the macro-level and running a state-owned enterprise at the micro-level before introducing them to the theory of the political economy of socialism.Footnote ⁵⁴ Because of the disorganisation of training in the faculties, the lack of enterprises hiring after graduation and the uncertainty associated with the acquisition of a body of knowledge that had been mostly selected by the professors themselves, the number of economics students decreased in East Germany from 584 in 1951 to 214 in 1953. The reorganisation of the faculties in 1955 promoted its regular increase to 3474 students in 1965.Footnote ⁵⁵

Despite actual difficulties to establish ‘red faculties’, which would become academic agents of party policies, a progressive decoupling of pan-European intellectual economic networks appeared beginning in 1950.Footnote ⁵⁶ It followed three major incentives: the stronger direct intellectual influence of the Soviet Union over central and eastern European universities, the growing circulation of professors and pedagogical models between the people’s democracies and the promotion of new socialist sub-disciplines in economics.

For a short period of time, until 1951–3, two forms of European circulation of economic ideas coexisted. One was pan-European and rooted in the interwar period, when Keynesian ideas circulated in central and eastern Europe.Footnote ⁵⁷ Here the Polish case illustrates how pan-European influences remained reciprocal, to a certain extent, after 1945. Polish economic historians indeed influenced the debates on the economic division of Europe in the West via the French journal Annales until the late 1950s. Most of the academics holding key positions in the faculty of economic history in Warsaw between 1948 and the late 1960s had been trained in the interwar period in Marxist milieus but were no Stalinists.Footnote ⁵⁸ The other network, however, was limited to the socialist bloc and increasingly pushed the agenda of Soviet-like economic planning in the people’s democracies. These two coexisting networks provided opportunities for concurring academic communities to reorganise the curriculums in economics. In Poland, the so-called leftists and the conservative liberals had both been until 1949 under the influence of the neoclassical school and Keynes, rather than Marx. While the conservative liberals remained influential in the university of Kraków, the ‘leftists’ advocating the Soviet model started filling positions opening in other universities and on the Central Planning Board.Footnote ⁵⁹ In East Germany, the director of the institute for economic history of the University of Berlin, Professor Jürgen Kuczynski, advocated in the 1950s a new emphasis on the study of the planned economy under the influence of the academic competition he experienced with his colleague Professor Robert Naumann. The latter came back in 1950 from a thirty-year exile in the Soviet Union and was ‘the first political economist in East Germany to teach the closed system of the political economy of capitalism and socialism as it had been developed and taught in the Soviet Union’, which, according to Central Committee officials, had ‘a very positive impact on political economy education throughout East Germany’.Footnote ⁶⁰

The stronger emphasis on the legitimacy of the inputs given by Soviet scientists insisted on the teaching of the political economy of socialism in order to homogenise the body of knowledge in economics taught in the people’s democracies and to help them shift away from a pan-European space of knowledge circulation. When asked about the situation of the teaching of economics in East Germany in 1954, Soviet visiting professor Vladimir A. Vinogradov criticised the lack of textbooks providing a uniform knowledge about the political economy of socialism. He had been invited for a year to coordinate a group of East German scientists writing a textbook about planning the economy in East Germany. In 1955, the East German government extended the visiting professors’ scheme and asked its Soviet counterpart to delegate seven economics professors.Footnote ⁶¹ Their intellectual influence was sustained by the publication and rapid translation of ‘Stalin’s textbook’ about the political economy of socialism in 1954, whose last chapters were dedicated to the economic transition of the people’s democracies and their cooperation within the CMEA. After Russian had become a compulsory language course in East German economics faculties in 1954, the effort made to acquire and to translate Soviet academic research proved increasingly useful. It was complemented by the sending in 1951 of a first cohort of East Germans to the Soviet Union to study Soviet planning and contribute to the homogenisation of socialist economic knowledge within the bloc.

Greater attention paid to the Soviet model, however, was not the only element decoupling central and eastern European economists from the pan-European circulation of ideas in the early Cold War.Footnote ⁶² The common experience of transitioning from capitalist economies to centrally planned economies also encouraged the circulation of pedagogical models in the academic field of economics. Jürgen Kuczynski travelled to analyse the organisation of research in economics in Polish and Hungarian universities in 1952 and did the same a year later in Bulgaria.Footnote ⁶³ Members of the Central Committee, such as Dr Nultsch, also travelled to Poland in 1955 to analyse the teaching of economics. He pointed out that the organisation of the Polish academic system and its reforms were quite similar to the situation in East Germany. However, Nultsch noted that its counterparts reported ‘that the socialist self-consciousness of university teachers [was] so far advanced that it [could] be left to them to decide how they organise their lectures and what content they cover’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Intellectual exchanges between economics professors of the people’s democracies were therefore important in promoting a socialist-European circulation of knowledge that challenged the mere imposition of the Soviet model.

The Hungarian government also considered it essential to retain economists who might not belong to the communist party but whose contribution was easy to articulate within the socialist ideology.Footnote ⁶⁵ Like many of their colleagues in central European countries, these economists were concerned in the 1930s with the criticism of the ‘rationalisation’ theory and the theoretical justification of state management of the economy as a developing mechanism. This had been advocated by both ‘new classical’ German social-democratic economists and by the fascist and Nazi economic models. Even before communist governments came to power, many economists in central and eastern Europe had no difficulty in thinking of socialist planning as a tool for economic recovery, because of a pan-European circulation of state-led development models in the interwar period.Footnote ⁶⁶ Only the political framing of these economic ideas shifted. After 1945, the Soviet experience became the reference at bloc scale. The newly established communist governments committed to relying on Soviet advisors to train their future elites and placed many non-party-affiliated economists under the authority of new, less educated, partisan elites, who overtook the leading positions in the restored universities and research institutes.Footnote ⁶⁷

After 1945, socialism constituted in economics only one of several ‘rupture talks’, defined as ‘rhetorical invocations of technological inventions to proclaim the arrival of a new era or a new division of the world’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The idea of the newness of socialist economics was merely a discourse, which sought to conceal the fact that central European economic circles had been impregnated with planning ideas since the interwar period. The Soviet Union advocated the equalisation of socialist economics – and especially of the political economy of socialism – with its own model of state-led central planning, when the development of socialism in the country had in fact been characterised since the 1920s by continuities and hybridisation processes between liberal and socialist economic tools. Market mechanisms persisted long after the NEP.Footnote ⁶⁹ Since Bolshevik ideas had been developed before the October Revolution through interaction with western European intellectuals,Footnote ⁷⁰ liberal and socialist economics can be considered the product of an entangled history of modernisation and development in Europe in the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁷¹ The Soviet official emphasis on state-led central planning during the Cold War did not mean that market mechanisms disappeared from economic practices or academic debates among socialist economists. Central planning as an alternative to market regulation was an ‘economic narrative’, a story that made its audience,Footnote ⁷² intended to disqualify pan-European economic debates in which central and eastern European economists were embedded until the late 1950s. This narrative helped enforce a ‘real-existing socialist bloc’ based on a shared and allegedly specific political economy elaborated in the Soviet Union.

The rupture talk, however, was accompanied by concrete scientific evolutions that contributed to the decoupling of central and eastern European economists from their pan-European intellectual networks of the inter-war period. Since the mid-1950s, economists in the people’s democracies aligned with the Soviet Union in replacing the ‘bourgeois’ structuration between ‘national economy/business economics’ at the University with the more socialist division between ‘political economy’ and the new discipline of ‘engineer economics’, which had been invented in the Soviet Union in 1924. Industrial economics, which was central in business economics and had been related to market economy and the analysis of the enterprises’ individual performances, was to be replaced after 1955 in the people’s democracies by engineer economics. This latter became, alongside the Soviet model, a specific branch of the curriculum in economics, parallel to the one in political economy.

Students were supposed to enjoy the necessary amount of engineer courses providing them with a technical understanding of the production that would sustain the ‘scientific-technical revolution’, which became the socialists’ modernist mantra between 1955 and the 1970s.Footnote ⁷³ ‘Engineer economists’ were then able to promote the ‘socialist competition’ in state-led enterprises, which aimed at achieving collective and social goals while improving their production, in an emulation process that had nothing to do with capitalist competition on a market or the rationalisation promoted by industrial economics. Although this intellectual debate revealed the influence of the Soviet Union over the decoupling of interwar pan-European networks of the circulation of economic ideas, as well as the establishment of a socialist-European space of circulation of ideas, it did not bring radical changes in practice. Industrial economics was eventually reintroduced to the curriculum after 1956, along with engineer economics.

Under the influence of these academic reforms and closer integration within the CMEA, the people’s democracies gradually converged towards the dissemination of common economic ideas by the second half of the 1950s and East–East trade grew from less than 50 per cent to over 60 per cent of their foreign trade.Footnote ⁷⁴ The people’s democracies remained integrated in the global economy – although this embeddedness only became strategic in the 1970sFootnote ⁷⁵ – and their economists remained capable of relatively autonomous theoretical productions. Yugoslavia, which abandoned state ownership of enterprises in 1950 in favour of ‘social ownership’ and converted to the principle of free market in 1954, constitutes a radical example of this room for manoeuvre.Footnote ⁷⁶ Without going so far as to break with the Soviet Union, East German economists such as Jürgen Kuczynski underlined as early as 1947 that ‘the experience of the construction of the Soviet Union under the model of a planned economy should be specifically analysed, although one should always bear in mind that its schematic transposition is not possible in the German context’.Footnote ⁷⁷

Visiting Bulgaria in January 1954, East German economics professor Günther Kohlmey also insisted on the fact that this trip had confirmed his view ‘of how extremely important it is to apply the theory of the economy in the transition period from capitalism to socialism specifically to the respective historical conditions of socialist construction in the individual countries’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The same trip to Bulgaria a year earlier had convinced Jürgen Kuczynski that pan-European scientific relations should also be preserved with West Germany.Footnote ⁷⁹ Both professors were ‘role models’ for generations of economists trained in East Germany and, although they had different political biographies, were capable of intellectual autonomy and criticism of the Soviet model.Footnote ⁸⁰ According to Kuczynski:

East German intellectuals elaborating the new economics curriculum in socialist universities after the war still evolved in a pan-European space, where intellectual closeness with the Soviet Union was becoming increasingly important, but where economic practitioners still had to deal with an influential private sector participating in state planning. According to John Connelly, the same relative intellectual autonomy was characteristic of most higher degree economic schools in the people’s democracies until 1951–3.Footnote ⁸²

Destalinisation, Pan-European Legacies and the Circulation of ‘Revisionist’ Socialist Economics in the Late 1950s

The simultaneous embeddedness of central and eastern European economists in the pan-European legacy of the interwar period and in the newly established socialist-European space polarised by the Soviet Union allowed for the shaping of critical economic thinking in the socialist bloc in the second half of the 1950s. In March 1955, before Khrushchev had initiated the thaw, a conference on the ‘transition period from capitalism to socialism in East Germany’ brought together several eastern European reformist economists in Berlin, including Polish economist Włodzimierz Brus.Footnote ⁸³ One year later, the destalinisation launched by Khrushchev provided another echo chamber for economic criticism. However, different ways of theorising socialist economics had already been developed in the early 1950s, so that the thaw cannot be considered the sole factor explaining debates on the legitimacy of aligning socialist economics with the Soviet experience. An academic network had been established in 1955, which quickly circulated two articles published in October 1956 by East German reformist economists Fritz Behrens and Arne Benary. Both challenged the model character of the Soviet Union in socialist economicsFootnote ⁸⁴ and promoted the decentralisation of planning and the strengthening of horizontal relations between economic actors.Footnote ⁸⁵ Günther Kohlmey sided with these ideas in May 1956 and published a note on ‘the overcoming of dogmatism in our scientific work’ in which he denounced Stalin’s ‘errors’. He criticised the sterile alignment toward socialist economics along the sole Soviet model:

Their ideas were taken up by the Polish Economic Council, chaired by Oskar Lange, which adopted the ‘Theses on Certain Directions for Change in the Economic Model’. Czechoslovakian representatives ruled in the same direction in 1958–9 until the debate was eventually formalised by Włodzimierz Brus between 1959 and 1961 in his General Problems of the Functioning of the Socialist Economy, in which he dissociated socialist economics from central planning.Footnote ⁸⁷ These ideas were quickly disqualified as revisionist, and their supporters were blacklisted from major academic institutions at the turn of the 1960s. However, this transnational discussion is further proof of the ‘multilevel-multipolar’ dynamics of a European economic circulation of ideas in the Cold War and the influential legacy of interwar pan-European economic debates among communists and Marxist economists.Footnote ⁸⁸

Socialist economics as it was developed and circulated between Germany, France and central European countries in the interwar period was indubitably in dialogue with contemporary Soviet debates. Nevertheless, it was also deeply rooted in the capitalist context of the interwar period, characterised by the increasing academic popularity of state-led regulation of the markets as well as the extension of the social-democratic concept of economic democracy. This room for manoeuvre delayed beyond the early years of the Cold War the homogenisation of socialist economics into a body of knowledge describing an economic system different from the capitalist one. A shared and coherent geoeconomic model was therefore never the driving force of the socialist bloc. I concur here with Johanna Bockman in showing how non-Soviet communist economists – between the 1920s and the late 1950s – formed a liminal space in which ‘transnational dialogue among heterogeneous networks created new neoclassical knowledge and new knowledge about socialism’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Adding to Bockman and Eyal’s analysis, this article proved that the dialogue about socialist economics was not only shaped by exchanges with the United States but also influenced by the embeddedness of communist intellectuals in various national economic and political contexts since the 1920s.Footnote ⁹⁰ This explains the resilience of central European networks of economists and their ability to sustain different European frameworks of discussion for economic forms of real-existing socialism up until the 1960s. If a transnational epistemic community of socialist economists existed, its members did not necessarily share the exact same knowledge.Footnote ⁹¹ Rather, this pan-European community included Soviet economists and was shaped by a ‘dynamic of dissent’, staging the discussion of historically grounded and locally rooted economic knowledge and illustrating the different socio-economic contexts in which socialist economists were trained.Footnote ⁹²