Global influences and impacts
From Kievian Rus’ to post-Soviet times, Russia and Ukraine were often integrated in global currents of thought. The Eastern Orthodox Church, which came from Rome after successive schisms, or the modern Cyrillic alphabet, which results from successive adaptations from the Greek alphabet, are perfect examples of the ubiquitous importance of the circulation of ideas.
In their first centuries, Russia and Ukraine mostly borrowed ideas and techniques. And it was done in a way of adapting them to local conditions.Economic thought in Russia and Ukraine was for a long time (as elsewhere) encompassed in broader social thought and very little differentiated from the latter. But the desire, at the beginning of the ninteenth century, to imitate developments in Western Europe produced a different story. Political economy was rapidly institutionalised; chairs were established at universities, scientific societies were inaugurated. But, the autonomy of the discipline had not even started. This explains in large part the fact that, during the nineteenth century up to the first decade of the twentieth century, the import of knowledge from Europe had such an impact in Tsarist Russia. Books were imported and translated. But also professors were imported (Germans were at that time considered the most erudite, while in the eighteenth century it would have been the French and English). From the 1890s, things began to change. Original ideas were exported (Tugan-Baranovsky’s and Kondratiev’s works on crises and cycles for instance). During the 1920s, many academic exchanges took place between the Soviet Union, Germany and the USA. With Stalin and after, there was a reversal of the trend: ideas were no longer imported. The USSR and USA were cautiously watching each other, but didn’t exchange ideas any more, except with emigre economists: Russian professors were welcomed in German universities (the reverse situation, 150 years after) and in the USA. With the fall of the USSR, Russia and Ukraine strongly started again the importation of Western economic ideas, with always the same question: are these theories good for us?
Many lively discussions were driven, and continue to attract the finest scholars, over the issue of whether there is (or is not) a Russian and a Ukrainian economic thought.
The two extreme positions are the following. The first believe that the science of political economy was born in Russia in 1802—06 with the first translation of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. They think that political economy is, if not universal, at least a Western affair, although Russia and Ukraine may benefit from these ideas. The second think that there is genuine indigenous economic thought going back to well before the arrival of classical political economy (or the Physiocrats or Mercantilists) on Russian and Ukrainian soils. This indigenous thought should be traced back in the specificities of the indigenous economy: the obshchina, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the characteristics of the Russian muzhik, etc.In the Soviet Union, there was an official position stating that, while the Russian bourgeois only imitated Western economists, there was a genuine non-bourgeois Russian economic thought that owed nothing to Western ideas: instead of catching up with their Western colleagues, genuine Russian socialists were actually far beyond them (see the papers in Problems of Economic Transition, 2002, 9—10). The truth is probably in between the two extremes. To sum up, Russian and Ukrainian economic thought was often fed by foreign ideas, which were adapted to local conditions. In a few occasions (in the 1890s, the 1920s and with Kantorovich’s Nobel Prize in economics in 1975) the balance of trade of economic thought showed a surplus of exports.