Preobrazhensky, Evgenii Alexeyevich (1886-1937)

Preobrazhensky was an Old Bolshevik and an original and perceptive Marxist theorist. His main contribution to Marxist political economy concerned the building of socialism in a predominantly agrarian country at a low level of economic development. He argued that socialist accumulation in such a country would require an initial period of original socialist accumulation. That is, economic growth on the basis of investment generated within industry would have to be preceded, in backward Russia with its limited industry, by a period of economic growth on the basis of investment resources obtained from outside the state sector.