Yevgeni Preobrazhensky’s Plan to Build a Socialist Economy
The Russian Marxist Yevgeni Preobrazhensky drew up one of the most sophisticated blueprints for building a socialist economy in an underdeveloped country like Russia. Stalin’s terror silenced Preobrazhensky, but his writings are now being rediscovered.
Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, in the center with the mustache, at the Soviet-UK negotiations in London, March 24, 1924. (Projector / Wikimedia Commons)
Born in 1886, Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky was a Russian revolutionary from his teenage years. Like so many of that generation, he was eventually murdered in Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge, after playing a leading role in the debates about how to construct a socialist economic system in the Soviet Union during the 1920s.
Preobrazhensky was the author of numerous works, the best known of which are 1919’s The ABC of Communism, coauthored with another leading Bolshevik, Nikolai Bukharin, and The New Economics from 1926. Preobrazhensky’s writings are now more accessible to an English-speaking audience through the publication of a massive, three-volume edition of his works, The Preobrazhensky Papers, between 2014 and 2023.
A Revolutionary Life
The son of a priest, Preobrazhensky belonged to Russia’s underground Social Democratic Party from 1903. One of his first actions was to distribute a statement to his fellow students opposing the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. During the 1905 revolution, his group led a general strike in Oryol educational establishments, and he became a full-time party worker in the Urals.
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