Struve, Pyotr Berngardovich (1870–1944)

Abstract

The son of the Provincial Governor in Perm’, Russia, Struve was born on 26 January 1870 and died in Paris on 26 February 1944. He was born in the year that A.I. Herzen died and his biographer (Pipes 1970, 1980) and editor of his Collected Works, 1970, quoted Struve’s words on Herzen as applicable ‘with equal justice to himself … “he was repelled by the subtlest, most spiritual form of despotism – dogmatism”’. Struve’s formal training in economics was limited to Hildebrand’s course at Graz University but he was one of the most prominent and certainly the most prolific (160 publications) of marxist economists in Tsarist Russia, and helped to create the country’s first modern faculty of economics. While a marxist (he was the editor of marxism’s first legally published journal in Russia), Struve in (1900) integrated ‘Ricardo’s careful realism’ and the Austrian’s School’s utility within ‘the grandiose framework of Marx’s sociological generalizations’. As his marxism waned (in his autobiography (1934), Struve saw himself as the first ‘revisionist’), he criticized value as a valid economic concept and insisted that price was the only scientifically acceptable relevant unit of measurement. In later writings (Struve, 1913; 1916) he so defined price as to deny any Walrasian tâtonnement by maintaining that bid and offer are comprised within a price.