Sergei Ivanovich Solntsev

Born Oct. 1 (13), 1872, in the village of Tereshok, Roslavl’ Raion, Smolensk Oblast; died Mar. 13,1936, in Moscow. Soviet economist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1929).

Solntsev studied in the faculty of law of the University of St. Petersburg from 1900 to 1904. From 1909 to 1913 he studied economics abroad. From 1913 to 1930 he taught and did research at the universities of St. Petersburg and Tomsk, Novorossiia University in Odessa, the Odessa Institute of the National Economy, and other institutions of higher learning. From 1930 he worked at the Council for the Study of Productive Forces.

Studying wages in capitalist society as a problem of the distribution of the national income, Solntsev strove to demonstrate the antagonism between the working class and the bourgeoisie and the working class’s decreasing share of the national income. Although he recognized the relative impoverishment of the working class, he underestimated its absolute impoverishment. Solntsev failed to relate the concepts of distribution and production.