Professor Malyarov As I Knew Him

TRIBUTE

Professor Oleg Vasilyevich Malyarov, the eminent Indologist and a multifaceted personality, unexpectedly passed away on the very day of Easter in his village house in Russia’s Novgorod district. In his demise while India lost a sincere friend, Russia lost a great patriot, a leading Marxist scholar, a brilliant economist and a valiant fighter for social justice. Malyarov, born in Vladivostok, had received his higher education from the prestigious Economics Faculty of the world famous Moscow State University. He was posted in India from 1958 to 1962 as a representative of Soviet State Committee on Economic Cooperation with Foreign Countries after completion of his post-graduation in Economics. He became so deeply involved with India during this period that he never looked at any other nation for his country specialisation.

This was the aftermath of the period when India and the USSR discovered each other for a mutually beneficial productive partnership following India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s historic visit to the former Soviet Union and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s return visit to India. Nehru, after the Western snub to provide assistance for India’s industrialisation with an emphasis on building heavy industry in the state sector, found a perfect partner in the Soviet Union, which readily agreed to extend that assistance and in return the latter found a partner for peace in the atmosphere of war-mongering of the Western countries in an increasingly bipolar world.

Khrushchev emphasised on providing economic and technological assistance to India in order to make it the pivot in his crusade for peaceful co-existence, and instructed to reinforce the Indian direction of Soviet foreign policy that included the opening of a special school in Moscow with particular emphasis on education about India and strengthening research on that country.

Malyarov, who had by then fallen in love with India, joined the Institute of Oriental Studies in 1966 after specialising on Indian economy. Since then he never looked back. Almost half-a-century of his life was fully dedicated to studies on India, particularly research on the Indian economy. He has written volumes on the Indian economy, but his monumental works on India’s industrialisation, its planning process, budget-making process, foreign trade, mixed economy concept etc. brought him immense repute at home and abroad. He has authored more than 200 research papers. However, his magnum opus was a two-volume “Independent India: Evolution of its Socio-economic Model” published in the year 2010. He published his last research work on the Indian economic management shortly before his sudden and untimely demise. Apart from research, he was engaged in teaching Indian economy in various prestigious educational institutions of Moscow.

In the initial years of proposed Soviet assistance to India’s economic development, there was an intense internal debate among Soviet scholars as to the usefulness of Soviet help to a capitalist country. While the dogmatic Marxists questioned the wisdom of providing economic assistance to capitalist India, pragmatists strongly argued in favour extending assistance for India’s socio-economic development. Professor Malyarov always firmly stood with the second group.

Based on the experience of Soviet directive planning and India’s indicative planning, Malyarov strongly advocated for a mechanism that combines market and plan, a concept that caught the attention of many a Soviet scholar in the 1980s, particularly during the perestroika years. Prof Malyarov remained a great votary of this concept and fought for its implementation in post-Soviet Russia till his death. He was one of the leading advocates of using the Indian experience in Russia’s economic development process and has presented many scholarly papers in numerous conferences on this subject. While most of the anti-liberal school in Russia usually argues in favour of using the Chinese experience in Russia’s development strategy, Professor Malyarov was in the forefront of those who strongly advocated in favour of taking advantage of the Indian experience while crafting Russia’s development model.

 Today there is hardly anybody who speaks in support of Yeltsin’s ill-conceived shock-therapy reforms that spelt a disaster for Russia in the 1990s. Even the very people who were associated with the drafting of this disastrous economic reform programme that led to Russia’s virtual de-industrialisation have distanced themselves from it. This programme also in many ways undermined the mutually beneficial coope-ration between our two countries in the decade following the Soviet break-up. However, Professor Malyarov from the very beginning was vociferous in criticising and denouncing these economic reforms. He was one of those who had predicted doom for the Russian economy unless there was a course correction in Yeltsin-Gaidar’s neo-liberal shock-therapy reforms.

He waged a relentless battle against the market fundamentalists and strongly argued in favour of combining state planning with the market mechanism. He, along with Russia’s most pro-mising new generation economists like Acade-mician Sergey Glaziyev, currently President Putin’s economic advisor, have been tirelessly working for drafting an alternative development strategy for Russia based on innovation-led growth and justice in the framework of planned development. While he talked about planning, he meant indicative planning, and when he talked about market, he meant a regulated market. He was a vociferous critic of the so-called “free market” and stood for a regulated market supplemented by the instruments of planning.

Professor Malyarov’s views have been vindicated by the worst ever economic crisis faced by world capitalism over the last several years. While the world, in the aftermath of the all-pervasive crisis of neo-liberal, free-market capitalism, is in search of new development paradigms, Professor Malyarov’s concept of combining plan with the market may suggest a prudent alternative and a way forward.

Professor Malyarov was a convinced and committed Marxist. In the early 1990s when the Communist Party was banned in Russia by former CPSU Polit-Bureau member Boris Yeltsin following the Soviet disintegration, tens of thousands of rank opportunists lost no time to throw their party membership cards into the dustbin, while many others simply chose to hide their party cards. There were a few to defy the Yeltsin regime’s pathological anti-communism. Professor Malyarov was among the leading intellectuals who could muster courage to fight the Yeltsin regime’s anti-communist crusade and anti-people policies. He was one of the founder members of the intellectual movement, known as “Russian Scientists for Socialist Orientation”, that tirelessly worked for providing new content and substance to socialism after the collapse of the Stalinist model of socialism in the former Soviet Union and East Europe. This organisation made a tremendous contribution towards mobilising thousands of intellectuals in the country for a new socialist movement. Malyarov rose to become a member of the Central Council of this organisation. Subsequently, Malyarov became an expert on the Economic Policy Committee of the State Duma, the Lower House of Russian Parliament.

All the members of Malyarov’s family were closely associated with India and the progressive socialist movement. While his wife, Galina Dosyuk, is an eminent Indologist specialising in Indian geography, his late son, Igor, was a bright star in post-Soviet Russia’s socialist youth movement. I had the good fortune of knowing the family from very close quarters. While Professor Malyarov was virtually my guru, his only son, Igor, was a dear friend of mine. Igor’s untimely death a few years back shattered the whole family. Professor Malyarov and Galina madam had to bring up the three little children that Igor left behind with their meagre salary. Galina madam lost her health after this tragedy. She could barely walk when I saw her at a conference dedicated to India in Moscow’s Kosmos Hotel a couple of years back. Professor Malyarov had gone through two heart attacks but never told anybody about those. My last meeting with him took place during my visit to Moscow last November. He looked well for his age; was full of ideas and plans as usual. I never thought that would turn out to be my last meeting with Professor Malyarov, the man of compassion, conviction, courage and commitment.

Prof Arun Mohanty is the Chairperson, Centre for Russian and Central Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru Universirty, New Delhi.