Vladimir Bazarov
Vladimir Alexandrovich Bazarov (1874–1939) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, journalist, philosopher, and economist who helped lay the groundwork for economic planning in the Soviet Union. He was born Vladimir Rudnev in Tula and later used the name Bazarov as an underground revolutionary alias.
As a student in Moscow, he joined revolutionary circles and organized a secret school for workers in Tula with Alexander Bogdanov and Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov. After being expelled from Moscow, he lived in Berlin, where he helped form the Neutral Group of Social-Democrats in Berlin, aiming to heal splits among Russian Marxists abroad. The group published a few proclamations before dissolving in 1901, and Bazarov returned to Russia to work with the Moscow Social Democratic Committee. He was exiled to Siberia for three years.
In 1904 he joined the Bolshevik faction and worked in St. Petersburg as part of the party’s underground leadership and press. He contributed to Rabochii put’ (The Workers’ Path) and helped publish a new Russian edition of Marx’s Capital with Bogdanov and Skvortsov-Stepanov. In philosophy, Bazarov rejected strict Marxist dialectical materialism in favor of empirical approaches inspired by Mach and Avenarius. This empirical-criticism split him from Lenin, though he remained an active Marxist.
Bazarov traveled to Capri in 1908 with Bogdanov, at the invitation of Maxim Gorky, in hopes of reconciling with Lenin—a plan that did not succeed. He continued his work in the movement, though he did not formally join either the Bolshevik or Menshevik factions. He was arrested again in 1911 and exiled to Astrakhan for three years. In 1912 he helped write for the newspaper Pravda with Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Gorky, and Lenin.
During World War I he wrote for several radical publications, including Gorky’s Novaya zhizn'. After the 1917 Revolution, Bazarov moved to Kharkov and wrote for Menshevik publications. In 1919 he published Na puti k sotsializmu, which drew criticism from Bukharin as part of a broader dispute over party lines and bureaucratic development.
In 1922 Bazarov joined the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), where he worked with Vladimir Groman. They helped develop the basics of Soviet industrial planning. In 1923, Gosplan received a paper from Groman and Bazarov arguing for central economic planning and noting that the New Economic Policy would require strong planning. They also developed the idea that economies like the Soviet Union show a leveling-off of growth as idle capacity is used up.
Bazarov published a 1924 pamphlet, Towards a Methodology for Strategic Planning, expanding his ideas about planning as the economy moved from recovery to expansion. He believed central direction of investment would spur growth and, in 1926, spoke of the aim to overtake and surpass the advanced capitalist countries.
He also argued that giving the village better industrial goods at low prices could boost agricultural output. In the late 1920s, as the push for collectivization grew, his views on gradual, rational growth came under attack from those favoring faster rates of extraction of resources.
A draft Five-Year Plan in 1927–28 proposed very rapid growth; Bazarov and his collaborators favored a more measured pace. He faced criticism and was excluded from some political debates. In the summer of 1930, he was arrested by the GPU and later implicated in the 1931 Menshevik Trial through testimony by associates, though he was not a public defendant.
Bazarov was kept in a political isolator and died of pneumonia in Moscow on September 16, 1939, at the age of 65. In 1999, a two-volume collection of documents from the 1931 trial included depositions from Bazarov.
Bazarov’s work helped establish the idea that centralized planning and methodical economic management were essential for the Soviet economy, shaping its development for years to come.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 11:00 (CET).