Lev Natanowitsch Krizman

Lew Natanowitsch Krizman (correct transliteration Krizman, in use, however, is only Kritsman; Russian Лев Натанович Крицман , scientific. Transliteration Lev Natanovič Kricman * 4 ^{. Jul} / 16th June  1890 ^greg. In Odessa ; † 17th June 1938 in Moscow ) was a Marxist economist and social scientist. Until about 1930 he was one of the most influential economists in the USSR .

Life, Positions and Meaning

Krizman came from a middle-class family; his father was a dentist. At the age of 15 he joined the RSDLP . Arrested several times and expelled from Odessa University in 1910 , he went abroad in 1911, first to Vienna , then - after the outbreak of the First World War - to Zurich . He attended lectures in economics and natural sciences at the universities in Vienna and Zurich , and obtained a doctorate in philosophy in Zurich . In late 1917, Krizman returned to Russia and joined the KPR (B) in 1918 . From January 1918 he worked as an employee for the WSNCh ; In May / June 1918 he took part in the conceptual preparation of the first socialization measures, whose implementation in the food and chemical industries he was largely responsible for. His nine-year-old son died in 1920, and Krizman himself became seriously ill and was sent abroad to recuperate for a few months in 1922. After his return he was active in a variety of ways: as an economics professor at the Communist Sverdlov University and Moscow University , as a member of the Communist Academy , as a board member of the central statistical authority and as deputy chairman of Gosplan . He was also a member of the editorial board of Pravda and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia . From 1925 Krizman headed the Agricultural Institute of the Communist Academy. In 1933 he withdrew from all public offices out of consideration for his now poor health.

Krizman gained importance primarily as a designer and interpreter of so-called war communism and as the leading head of a group of Soviet social scientists who extensively investigated the social conditions in the countryside created by the revolution and NEP in the second half of the 1920s . The studies that emerged in the latter context were “rediscovered” around 1980 by British historians who rated their quality as “extremely high”. The Krizman group had a long-standing controversy with the Tschajanow school, which they accused of underestimating the capitalist content of the peasant, only superficially stable family economy and the ongoing processes of social differentiation in the countryside. For its work, the circle around Krizman (whose members are occasionally summarized under the term "agrarian Marxists") not only collected objectively measurable data, but also organized extensive representative surveys in all parts of the country. Krizman was one of the first Soviet scientists to use this method on a large scale. As early as 1921/22, on behalf of the political leadership, he had conducted standardized interviews with almost 300 responsible "specialists" (technical officials, engineers, etc.) working in central Moscow authorities, the evaluation of which showed that around 90% of the respondents - of whom the most of them had already held comparable positions before 1917 - opposed to hostile to the political and social order of Soviet Russia.

Krizman's 1922 to 1924 work on "War Communism" is still one of the few larger publications on this subject. For him, the relevant decisions and measures discussed in detail were not essentially solutions to embarrassment forced by adverse circumstances, but the logical first steps of a socialist revolution:

“As a result, so-called 'war communism' (...) - by its very nature - was nothing that was imposed on the revolution from outside. (...) [It was] in reality (...) the first powerful attempt at a proletarian natural economy [meaning the abolition of commodity production], an attempt at the first steps of the transition to socialism. In its basic idea it by no means represented an aberration of persons or a class; it was - albeit not in a pure form, but with certain distortions - a premonition of the future, a breakthrough of this future into the present (which is already the past), which through the (...) specific conditions of the Russian proletarian revolution made possible has been."

At the same time he emphasized that historical “war communism” (which Krizman also referred to as “emergency economy”) was by no means a socialist planned economy in the strict sense of the word. The unresolved anarchy and inefficiency of social production ultimately turned it into a "non-socialist economy", which primarily negatively - due to its type of crisis - refers to the potential of socialist planning:

“All these (and many other) phenomena of the disruption of economic life, when they accumulate, lead to general crises in production (and exchange) both in the capitalist commodity economy and in the proletarian natural economy. The restriction of production, the restriction of transport, the restriction of exchange, the restriction of consumption, in a word the content of the crises, is here and there completely the same. But their appearance is directly opposite. In capitalist merchandise management (...) the crisis expresses itself as a sales crisis, as the impossibility of realizing the goods that the producer owns. In the proletarian natural economy (...) the crisis manifests itself on the contrary as a supply crisis, as the impossibility of obtaining the products that are needed for consumption. In other words: in the capitalist commodity economy the crisis of production expresses itself in the form of a crisis of overproduction, in the proletarian natural economy in the opposite form, a crisis of underproduction. "

The radical conception of the content and tendency of “war communism” brought Krizman into conflict with Lenin as early as 1921 . The establishment of a consistent and comprehensive use-value planning , which all major protagonists of "war communism" - besides Krizman also Jurij Larin and JA Preobrazhensky - was propagated in the following decades through the elaboration of a political economy based on the specific parameters of the planned economy realized after 1928 Socialism rejected theoretically and politically. The fundamental assumption by Krizman and other leading Soviet economists up to 1930 (cf. SI Solnzew ) that no “objective laws” would be effective in a purely socialist planned economy was valid after 1945 at the latest in East and West as the view of “some extremists”.

Krizman's grave is in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, his estate is kept in the archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences . Little information is available about Krizman's last years, apparently largely spent with private studies. In Russian-language publications, it is usually noted that he died of kidney disease in June 1938. In contrast, some recent publications from the English-speaking world indicate (without further specification or naming a source) that Krizman fell victim to the so-called Great Terror . His death is sometimes dated to 1937.

Works (selection)

• (together with Jurij Larin) Očerk chozjajstvennoj žizni i organizacija narodnogo chozjajstva Sovetskoj Rossii, 1 nojabrja 1917-1 ijulja 1920g , Moscow 1920; German as: Economic life and economic development in Soviet Russia 1917-1920 , Berlin 1921.
• Geroičeskij Period velikoj russkoj revoljucii , Moscow 1924; German as: The heroic period of the Great Russian Revolution. An attempt to analyze so-called "war communism" , Vienna-Berlin 1929.
• Klassovoe Rassloenie v sovetskoj derevne , Moscow 1926.
• Materialy po istorii agrarnoj revoljucii v Rossii , Moscow 1928.

literature

• Cox, Terry, Peasants, Class, and Capitalism. The Rural Research of LN Kritsman and his School , Oxford 1986.
• Cox, Terry, Littlejohn, Gary (Eds.), Kritsman and the Agrarian Marxists , London 1984.
• Danilov, Victor Petrovich, Rural Russia under the New Regime , London 1988.
• Malle, Silvana, The Economic Organization of War Communism 1918-1921 , Cambridge 1985.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Cox, Terry, Littlejohn, Gary (Eds.), Kritsman and the Agrarian Marxists, London 1984, p. 3.
2. ↑ See Dobb, Maurice, Soviet Economic Development since 1917, 6th Edition London 1966, p. 116.
3. ↑ Kritsman, Lew Natanowitsch: The heroic period of the Great Russian Revolution. An attempt to analyze so-called "war communism", Vienna-Berlin 1929, p. 122f.
4. ↑ Kritsman, The heroic period S. 199th
5. ↑ Kritsman, The heroic period, p two hundred and first
6. ↑ Kritsman, The heroic period S. 196th
7. ^ See Dobb, Development, p. 121.
8. ^ "Some extremists even denied the existence of economic laws under Socialism." Wilczynski, Jozef, The Economics of Socialism. Principles governing the operation of the centrally planned economies in the USSR and Eastern Europe under the new system, Chicago 1970, p. 29.
9. ↑ Information on Kritsman and his estate (Russian) , accessed on February 3, 2012.
10. ↑ See, for example, Smele, Jonathan D., The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921. An Annotated Bibliography, London 2003, p. 189.