Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (September 16 - December 15):
Véronique Mickisch’s dissertation explores the emergence of what she calls Stalinist economics in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. Mickisch defines Stalinist economics as a particular form of economics that was rooted in the traditions of statism and economic autarky. Mickisch places the shift in the USSR in the 1920s in the context of the international trend toward economic autarky that was initiated by World War I. At the same time, the Soviet example shows that alternatives to economic autarky did exist. Soviet economics had a variety of faces, but Stalinist economics was enforced through increasingly violent suppression of those who challenged it, culminating in the Terror of the 1930s. Mickisch’s research has significant implications for our understanding of the development not only of economics in the West but also in China. Here, political and economic thought after 1949 developed under significant influence of the trends that had emerged and become dominant in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, alternative, internationalist approaches to Marxist economics whose proponents were murdered in the Great Terror remained unknown.