Academician Leonid Abalkin was one of the leading economists in the former USSR. He died in Moscow on Monday, May 2, at 81 years aof age, RIA Novosti reports. In the era of perestroika was among software developers to move from a Soviet planned economy to a regulated market. In 1989 he became deputy head of the USSR Council of Ministers in the Government of Nikolai Ryzhkov and head of the governmental commission on economic reform. This post he held until the end of 1990.
“Mr. Abalkin was one of the figures at the origins of Russia’s transformation to a market economy and did much to establish new economic mechanisms. A scholar known all around the round, Academician Abalkin had deserved influence in the Russian and international academic communities,” President Medvedev said in his message of condolence.
Abalkin made known to the world many Russian and Soviet economists, and especially for the younger generation, revealing such thinkers as Pososhkov and Storch – the people who laid the foundation for modern economics.
“Pososhkov wrote the Book on Poverty and Wealth when Adam Smith was only one year old, and outlined in its fundamental concepts, which the British economist later described in his book The Wealth of Nations,” says Boris Profiriev, a colleague of the deceased ad the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
He stressed that Abalkin was not just a brilliant economist, but a man not afraid to take responsibility, willing to do everything to help the country in practice. “He was deputy chairman of the government … He was a practitioner, not afraid to take responsibility for his words or his own decisions,” says Profiriev.
The academic noted that Abalkina was very concerned about bias in favor of the finance sector. In particular during the crisis of 2008-2009, Abalkin spoken out against bias in assistance to the banking and financial sector.
Russkiy Mir Foundation Information Service
