On Belousov and Russian "economics"
In the Western press, there seems to be a lot of confusion over why an economist was named Defense Minister. But in Russia this makes sense because there was never a real Russian "economics" in the Western sense.
-- Belousov studied 'cybernetics.' This was part of a utopian Soviet drive to replace markets with scientific planning. At one time, the USSR boasted huge cybernetic institutes. It turned out that this was a good way for smart people to get away from Marxist-Leninnism and study cutting edge math. I took a few cybernetics classes: week one simplex method, week 2 Tikhonov regularization...students trained at special math schools had a deep intuitive hold of theoretical algebra. It's serious stuff. Kantorovich won the Nobel prize in this subject.
-- Russia developed in the cameralst (kameralwissenschaft) tradition. The emphasis was on preparing the state for war with a study of math, fortification, chemistry, logistics, taxation, budgets. Under Nicholas I, western "political economy" was banned. Russian cameralists developed the notion of Peacetime and wartime policies. This turned into the understanding of "world economics" and protectionist "national economics." Under the Soviets, this division continued as "bourgeois" and Marxist economics. When I studied in Russia, this militaristic cammeralist legacy could still be felt with "Western economics" and "the Russian school" of economics.
I wrote several articles on this, for example https://lnkd.in/g8pKswBr