Bliumin, Izrail

Born May 24 (June 5), 1897, in Rechitsa, in present-day Gomel’ Oblast; died June 10, 1959, in Moscow. Soviet economist. Doctor of economic sciences (1938). Professor (1937). Graduated from Moscow State University (1924) and the N. K. Krupskaia Communist Academy (1930). Senior scientific worker at the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1930–56) and the Institute of World Economics and International Relations of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1956–59). Professor at Moscow State University and other higher educational institutions in Moscow.

The bulk of Bliumin’s work was in the area of the history of economic thought. He was one of the first to give a comprehensive analysis of the main schools of contemporary bourgeois political economy. His main works are The Subjective School in Bourgeois Political Economy (1st ed., 1928; 2nd ed., revised, 1931; and in Selected Works, 1962); Essays on Contemporary Bourgeois Theoretical Economics: Toward the Characterization of a Social Orientation (1930); Capitalist Combination (1934); A Critique of Contemporary Bourgeois Political Economy in England (1953); and Essays on Contemporary Bourgeois Political Economy in the USA (1956). His work The Crisis of Contemporary Bourgeois Political Economy, which was published posthumously (1959), contains an analysis of the bourgeois theories of different countries that were disseminated after World War II. He was also the author of works on the history of Russian economic thought. A number of his works have been translated into English, French, German, Czech, Rumanian, Polish, and Bulgarian.