Yakov Kronrod’s Plan for Economic Democracy in the USSR
Yakov Kronrod played a major role in debates about how to reform the Soviet economy during the 1960s. His vision of a genuinely democratic economic system was too radical for Soviet leaders to accept because it threatened their authority.
During the 1960s, Soviet economists engaged in wide-ranging debates about how to reform the planned economic system. Yakov Kronrod was one of the key participants, but Soviet leaders couldn’t accept his vision of a truly democratic socialist economy. (Ullstein Bild via Getty Images)
Yakov Kronrod was a leading figure of the Soviet economic school of so-called marketeers (tovarniki) and a major participant in the debates about economic reform in the 1960s, as Soviet planners discussed whether to accord a greater role to market relations within the framework of the planned, nationalized economy.
Kronrod was born in 1912 and attended university during the 1930s. After completing his studies, he began working in the state planning and statistics agencies. When Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941, he immediately volunteered and fought in the battle of Moscow, ending the war in East Prussia with the rank of major.
After the war, he headed the theoretical section of the prestigious Institute of Economics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a position he occupied until his punitive demotion in the late 1960s. Revisiting Kronrod’s life and ideas can give us a fresh perspective on the rise and fall of the Soviet economic system, the most ambitious attempt to build an alternative to Western-style capitalism.
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