Iulii Zhukovskii

Born Apr. 22 (May 4), 1833, in St. Petersburg; died there Nov. 14 (27), 1907. Russian economist, publicist, specialist in the history of social thought. Director of the State Bank; a senator.

Zhukovskii began publishing in 1859. From 1860 to 1866 he contributed to the journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary), where articles of his appeared on economic and legal problems. He was the de facto editor of the newspaper Narodnaia letopis’ (1865) and one of the editors of the journal Kosmos (1869). Together with M. A. Antonovich he published the libelous book Material for an Evaluation of Contemporary Russian Literature (1869), which was directed against N. A. Nekrasov. Malicious attacks on Marxism are contained in his article “Karl Marx and His Book on Capital” (Vestnik Evropy, 1877, no. 9), which gave rise to Marx’ famous letter to Otechestvennye zapiski (The Fatherland Notes; see K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 19, pp. 116–21). An eclectic thinker, Zhukovskii incorporated into his outlook the diverse economic theories of A. Smith, T. Malthus, D. Ricardo, and J. B. Say; he denied the antagonistic nature of bourgeois productive relations and considered profit to be the result of the entrepreneurial activity of the capitalist, not of the exploitation of the hired worker. V. I. Lenin called Zhukovskii a “vulgar bourgeois” economist (seePoln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 1, p. 131).