Famous Russian Economists

Russian philosopher Peter Kropotkin was a passionate advocate of anarcho-communism. He was also an activist, revolutionary, economist, and sociologist. He was arrested and imprisoned for his activism in 1874. However, he managed to escape and lived in exile for over 40 years in different countries across Europe. He returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917. 

Born to a scientist father, Yulia Navalnaya grew up to be an acclaimed economist. She met her husband, lawyer and Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, while vacationing in Turkey. She has since been beside him through a number of tumultuous events, including his alleged poisoning by Russian officials.

Russian civil servant, politician and businessman Viktor Zubkov, who held different positions in the Leningrad Oblast, served as the 36th Prime Minister of Russia under President Vladimir Putin. When Putin became Prime Minister, Zubkov became first Deputy Prime Minister of Russia. Zubkov presently serves as chairman of the board of directors of Gazprom, by revenue the largest company in Russia.

Former Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov had begun his career as a journalist for Pravda. He later went on multiple espionage missions as a KGB official, using the codename MAKSIM. He also denied reports that his father was a victim of the Stalinist purge and that he had changed his surname.

Former Russian prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov was born to a math teacher father and an economist mother. He had been a skilled cellist and had a rock group in his early days. He grew up to be a renowned engineer and economist and also co-founded the opposition group The Other Russia.

Viktor Chernomyrdin had started his career at an oil refinery. He later became the Russian gas industry minister and the prime minister of Russia. He was also widely infamous for his idioms in syntactically incorrect language, later named Chernomyrdinki. A new diesel-electric icebreaker has been named after him.

The son of military correspondent Timur Gaidar, Yegor Gaidar initially worked as an economics researcher. He later became the minister of finance and administered shock therapy reforms. He also served as the deputy PM. He was poisoned while having breakfast at a conference in Ireland and died 3 years later.

Leonid Kantorovich was a Soviet economist and mathematician. Credited with founding linear programming, Kantorovich was honored with the prestigious Stalin Prize in 1949. In 1975, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the theory of optimum allocation of resources. He also made important contributions to functional analysis, operator theory, and approximation theory.

Russian politician and businessman Sergey Naryshkin is the current director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. After studying engineering initially, he had gained an economics degree, too, though it was later revealed that his economics dissertation was plagiarized. He also heads the Russian History Society.

The current director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, Mikhail Fradkov had begun his career working with the Soviet embassy in India. He has also been the prime minister of Russia and has headed the Foreign Intelligence Service. His was the first Russian government to voluntarily resign.

Russian politician and ex-Soviet military officer Alexander Rutskoy served as the only Vice President of Russia. He also served asthe Governor of Kursk Oblast for four years and is most noted for playing a key role during Russian constitutional crisis of 1993, when the Russian parliament impeached Russian president Boris Yeltsin and proclaimed Rutskoy as the acting president of Russia.

The first woman to serve as the governor of the Central Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina has also been an economic advisor to Russian president Vladamir Putin. The daughter of a factory manager mother and a driver father, she made it to the Forbes Power Women 2020 list.

Born into a family of Russian Orthodox priests, Sergei Bulgakov, had grown distant from theology in his youth and studied law and political economy instead. Though he experimented with Marxism, he later moved back to the Church and formed what is now known as sophiology.

Russian Soviet economist, statistician and proponent of the New Economic Policy (NEP) Nikolai Kondratiev, one of the early leading figures of Soviet economics, is best remembered for the business cycle theory called Kondratiev waves. Major works of Kondratiev include The Grain Market and The World Economy and its Conjunctures During and After the War.

From serving in Soviet labor camps to working at a metallurgical factory, Igor Smirnov had done it all before he joined the campaign to free Transnistria. He eventually became the region’s first president, in spite of it not being recognized as an independent state internationally.

Best known as the father of strategic management for devising the strategy model known as Ansoff’s matrix, Russian-American applied mathematician Igor Ansoff had also taught at the Carnegie Mellon University. He had also managed countless technology projects and consulted with companies such as IBM, Gulf, and General Electric.

From being the chief economist of the Russian finance ministry to serving as the deputy prime minister for social policy, Tatyana Golikova has done it all. Known as Miss Budget in popular media, she specializes in labor economics. She was also named Madam Arbidol for her alleged association with Pharmstandard.

Russian historian Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff is best-known for producing significant works on ancient Roman and Greek history. He emerged as an influential authority on ancient-history of South Russia and Ukraine while working in Russia. The term caravan city is believed to have been coined by him. Noted books of Rostovtzeff include Dura-Europos and Its Art and Skythien und der Bosporus.

Russian naturalist and philosopher Nikolay Yakovlevich Danilevsky is remembered for opposing Darwin’s theory of evolution and for mingling Russian nationalism with his own study of natural history. He likened cultures to species and claimed that each culture was unique and could not pass on cultural traits to other cultures.

The son of a KGB officer who was thrown out of the U.S. for spying as a journalist, Russian economist Vladimir Lopukhin had served as his country’s first energy minister. He had also been part of the boards of various banks and investment companies. He died of COVID-19 at age 68.

Russian economist, politician, and reformer Boris Fyodorov served as minister of finance of the RSFSR, minister of finance of Russia and deputy Prime Minister of Russia. He worked for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, served as director of the World Bank and as board member of several companies, including Gazprom. He also co-founded the United Financial Group UFG.

Liberal Russian economist, statesman and academician of St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences Nikolai Bunge, was the leading architect of Russian capitalism during the reign of Alexander III. As finance minister, Bunge made several reforms to modernize the Russian economy. He consolidated the Empire’s banking system, introduced significant tax law changes and founded the Peasants' Land Bank to help peasants purchase lands.

Economist, journalist and politician Yekaterina Dmitriyevna Kuskova of the Russian Empire advocated for social reformism and opposed the Bolsheviks and Vladimir Lenin’s authoritarian policies following the October Revolution. She was a member of the nascent Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (RSDRP) and later became a founding member of the liberal Union of Liberation, which was renamed as the Constitutional-Democratic Party (KDP).

Best remembered as a co-founder of the Northern Society of the Decembrist revolution, Russian economist and revolutionary Nikolay Turgenev was inspired by the French Revolution in his youth. He opposed serfdom and penned various books such as Experience of the Theory of Taxation and Russia and the Russians.