Soviet Mathematics and Economic Theory in the Past Century: A Historical Reappraisal

What are the effects of authoritarian regimes on scholarly research in economics? And how might economic theory survive ideological pressures? This article addresses these questions by focusing on the mathematization of economics over the past century and drawing on the history of Soviet science. Mathematics in the USSR remained internationally competitive and generated many ideas that were taken up and played important roles in economic theory. These same ideas, however, were disregarded or adopted only in piecemeal fashion by Soviet economists, despite the efforts of influential scholars to change the economic research agenda. The article draws this contrast into sharper focus by exploring the work of Soviet mathematicians in optimization, game theory, and probability theory that was used in Western economics. While the intellectual exchange across the Iron Curtain did help advance the formal modeling apparatus, economics could only thrive in an intellectually open environment absent under Soviet rule.