Programming the USSR: Leonid V. Kantorovich in context.

Ivan Boldyrev,Till Düppe

doi:10.1017/s0007087420000059

Abstract

In the wake of Stalin's death, many Soviet scientists saw the opportunity to promote their methods as tools for the engineering of economic prosperity in the socialist state. The mathematician Leonid Kantorovich (1912-1986) was a key activist in academic politics that led to the increasing acceptance of what emerged as a new scientific persona in the Soviet Union. Rather than thinking of his work in terms of success or failure, we propose to see his career as exemplifying a distinct form of scholarship, as a partisan technocrat, characteristic of the Soviet system of knowledge production. Confronting the class of orthodox economists, many factors were at work, including Kantorovich's cautious character and his allies in the Academy of Sciences. Drawing on archival and oral sources, we demonstrate how Kantorovich, throughout his career, negotiated the relations between mathematics and economics, reinterpreted political and ideological frames, and reshaped the balance of power in the Soviet academic landscape.

Highlights

One of the driving forces of Western science in the twentieth century was the notion of promoting rationality in modern societies
The mathematician Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) was a key activist in academic politics that led to the increasing acceptance of what emerged as a new scientific persona in the Soviet Union
Rather than thinking of his work in terms of success or failure, we propose to see his career as exemplifying a distinct form of scholarship, as a partisan technocrat, characteristic of the Soviet system of knowledge production

Summary

Introduction

One of the driving forces of Western science in the twentieth century was the notion of promoting rationality in modern societies. How would his technical approach to economic problems relate to the authoritative discourse of the political economy of socialism – Marx applied to a socialist economy – that was being simultaneously debated at the highest ranks, Stalin included?24 The discursive gap between the planning of local production and that of an entire nation would be the single most important obstacle in Kantorovich’s career: In the spring of 1939 I gave some more reports – at the Polytechnic Institute and the House of Scientists, but several times met with the objection that the work used mathematical methods, and in the West the mathematical school in economics was an anti-Marxist school, and mathematics in economics was a means for apologists of capitalism.[25]

Results

Conclusion