In Memory of Yakov Pevzner (Jan. 15, 1914 – Feb. 6, 2003)

My former Professor, Yakov Alexandrovich Pevzner died in Moscow at the age of 89. He was a great teacher and an even greater friend for me. I will miss him tremendously...

I first met him when I was 19 years old and a student at Moscow University. He really made me interested in economics for the first time and he also explained to me (carefully, since those were some of the darkest years in the USSR since the death of Stalin) that there was so much more to "bourgeois economics" than I was taught in official courses. He gave me his biggest treasure, "The History of Economic Analysis" by Joseph Schumpeter, with pages criticizing Marxist economic theory torn out by censors (that was the deal under which he, a senior professor with the USSR Academy of Sciences could only keep the book at his home). But the censors were not just wicked and arrogant, they were also stupid because the logic of the book was so powerful that I never missed the censored part. That copy of Schumpeter's great book, tortured by Soviet censors and ragged by Yakov Alexandrovich's and my own intense reading is now among my dearest treasures...

Professor Pevzner had had the courage and strength to resist and thwart the militant ignorance pervading the official Soviet economic science long before it became safe and even fashionable to do so in the open. As head of the department of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the USSR Academy of Sciences he brought together a group of talented people whom he nurtured and protected against malevolent idiots of all sorts. He also never hesitated to speak out in defense of what he considered to be scientific truth and was repeatedly ostracized for it by various reactionaries. His contribution to bringing up and enlightening several generations of Soviet economists and to the study of the Japanese economy in the former Soviet Union had been enormous.

Yakov Alexandrovich had the spirit of a true researcher, intellectually honest and always eager to learn new things, an eternal teenager. He also had the spirit of Russian intelligentsia: scrupulously honest, reliable and trustworthy. He loved life, his wife, his children and his friends, and he will be remembered by many people both inside and outside of Russia.