Economist Leonid Kantorovich Dies at 75 : Nobel Laureate Played Key Role in Reforms of Soviet Economy

The Soviet economist and mathematician whose theories had a profound impact on world economic thought--bringing him a Nobel Prize--has died, the official news agency Tass reported.

It said Leonid Kantorovich had died Monday at age 75.

His international contribution was recognized in his being chosen for the Nobel Economics Prize in 1975, the year that dissident Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Kantorovich was allowed to go to Stockholm to receive his share of the $143,000 prize, which was given jointly to Dutch-born American Tjalling Koopmans of Yale University. But Sakharov was refused permission on the grounds that his earlier nuclear weapons research made him a security risk.

Kantorovich had played a central role in the reforms that swept the stagnating and theory-bound Soviet economy after the death of dictator Josef Stalin, introducing more flexibility into Marxist economic theory and planning.

At first his work was branded as “non-Marxist, bourgeois science” because he tried to attack economic problems with mathematic models--a deviation from Marxist-Leninist philosophy.

In the 1970s he became prominent in developing the application of computers to the economy, but his equations proved more difficult to apply in his homeland than elsewhere because the Soviet Union was severely lacking in sophisticated computers.

Kantorovich’s theories were widely used in the West by governments exploring the role of state planning in the economy.

Kantorovich, for many years a professor at Leningrad University, had been a member of the prestigious Academy of Sciences since 1964.