Almanac Istoki

The first issue of the almanac Istoki (‘The Origins’) was published in 1989 by the group of scholars in history of economic thought and economic history from the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences and the Moscow State University. The publication of Istoki became a formative element at the origins of the Higher School of Economics headed by Rector Kuzminov. The history of the almanac belongs to the history of transformation of economic science in Russia in the post-Soviet period. 

Almanac traditionally contains sections with translations (the first issue launched the Russian edition of Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis) and original contributions on various aspects of the history of economic thought, economic methodology, economic history. 

The ninth issue: Economics — ‘the Dismal Science’?

The first section of the latest (ninth) issue offers a provocative pamphlet by Thomas Carlyle, who coined the famous label ‘dismal science’ in the context of the justification of slavery in the American colonies, jointly with John Stuart Mill’s rebuttal of Carlyle.  The historical controversy is analyzed in the articles by Joseph Persky, Peter Groenewegen, Natalia Makasheva, Rostislav Kapeliushnikov. 
The second section contains the texts presented at the round table on trends in modern macroeconomics, organized in the Department of Theoretical Economics and centered around the presentation by Revold Entov. 
The almanac also features articles by Natalia Rozinskaya, Devon Dear and Masachika Shiotani on the economic relations between the Russian Empire and the East in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The article by the Bulgarian colleagues Nikolay Nenovsky and Pencho Penchev describes the intellectual impact of Simeon Demosthenov and Naum Dolinsky, Russian émigré economists, on the Bulgarian economic science of the interwar period.
Leonid Grebnev, an employee of the Gosplan in the 1970s and 1980s, provides a valuable insight into the inner working of the Soviet economy. Evgeny Yasin shares his reflections inspired by the analysis of Grebnev’s article. Yuri Kochevrin’s article contains an original analysis of the Soviet monetary system. The issue concludes with a set of previously unpublished memoirs about Leonid Kantorovich by his students, collaborators, and relatives based on a series of oral interviews.

Almanac page on the publisher's website.