Matthias’s Reviews > Building a Ruin: The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform > Status Update

Man, everybody who's somebody in this story is someone's son-in-law. Obviously not surprising, from a comparative perspective, and these aren't necessarily failsons (a lot of them are clearly very smart.) Elites passing on positions and privileges to sons-in-law is interesting insofar as it's less strictly nepotistic than sons but more than blind advancement - a bit like Roman adoption practices, maybe.

Feygin points out the irony that during the Khruschev thaw the economists with more radical policy proposals re: embracing markets came from a more orthodox Marxist background, while the ones whose reform proposals centered around more rationalized, actually-comprehensive central planning used non-Marxist frameworks. But this isn't surprising at all: all the categories of Marxian economics are capitalism-specific!