Russian Thinkers

A history of Russian socio-economic thought from Pososhkov, the self-taught merchant who wrote on poverty and wealth under Peter I, through the Smithian professors of the early nineteenth century, Radishchev, the Decembrist economists, Herzen and Chernyshevsky, down to the Populist theorists Vorontsov and Danielson and the first Russian Marxists.

Anikin does it with learning, sympathy and a novelist's eye for the person inside the doctrine. For an English reader this is very nearly the only door into a tradition Russians have argued over for a century and a half, and where he reads a thinker closely - Chernyshevsky's economic essays, Sieber's reading of Capital, the real difference between Danielson and Vorontsov that both sides usually blur - he is often the only guide available.

Two strengths carry the book. The first is his grasp of censorship as the shaping condition of Russian thought rather than a footnote to it: a thirty-year prohibition on writing about serfdom, a repression that obliged the bolder writers to work by implication, and a whole literary form - the thick journal, where economics sat beside fiction - evolved to slip past the censor.

The second is that he keeps the human ledger. Russian social thought, as he puts it, begins in the Peter and Paul fortress, and he does not let the reader forget what it cost the men who made it.

Genuine scholarship rather than apparatus prose, and it deserves to be met as such.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.