Prokopovich, Sergei

Born 1871 in Tsarskoe Selo, now the city of Pushkin, Leningrad Oblast; died 1955 in Geneva. Russian bourgeois economist, publicist, and political figure.

Prokopovich graduated from the University of Brussels in 1899. He joined the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad and was an extreme right-wing proponent of economism. In 1904 he became a member of the council of the liberal bourgeois Union of Liberation. In 1905, for a short time, he was a member of the central committee of the Cadets. In 1906 he became editor, together with E. D. Kuskova, of the St. Petersburg magazine Bez zaglaviia.

After the revolution of February 1917, Prokopovich was minister of commerce and industry (August) and minister in charge of food supply (September-October) in the Provisional Government. He was hostile to the October 1917 revolution. In 1921, together with Kuskova and N. M. Kishkin, he joined the Central Commission for Famine Relief (Pomgol), which he attempted to use in the struggle against Soviet power. In 1922 he was exiled from the USSR for anti-Soviet activity. While in emigration (in Berlin, Prague, Geneva, and beginning in 1939, the US), Prokopovich directed, in the 1920’s and 1930’s, the publication of the Ekonomicheskii sbornik (Economic Review), the Russkii ekonomicheskii sbornik (Russian Economic Review), and other journals.

Prokopovich’s works were mainly concerned with agrarian policy and the condition of the working class under capitalism. Prokopovich opposed any revolutionary agrarian reform and focused on granting civil rights to the peasantry. In his view, the working class must achieve an improvement in its situation only within the framework of the capitalist system. Prokopovich was an active proponent of E. Bernstein’s ideas in Russia. In the words of V. I. Lenin, “Prokopovich is more Bernsteinian than Bernstein” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 4, p. 303). Prokopovich’s works on the economic history of the USSR and the theory and practice of socialist construction are fundamentally hostile to the Soviet system.