Evgenii Varga

Born Nov. 6, 1879, in Budapest; died Oct. 7, 1964, in Moscow. Soviet economist, academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939), prominent figure in the international Communist movement. Member of the CPSU from 1920. Born into a teacher’s family.

While a student at the University of Budapest, Varga participated in the revolutionary movement in Austria-Hungary and Germany. In 1906 he became a member of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party, siding with its left wing. He contributed to theoretical organs of the Social Democratic press. In 1909 the University of Budapest conferred on him the degree of doctor of philosophy, and in 1918 he became professor of political economy at the university. Varga was people’s commissar of finance and then chairman of the Supreme Council on the National Economy of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. He emigrated to the Soviet Union alter the defeat of the Hungarian proletarian revolution of 1919. From the first years of the existence of the Communist International, Varga was one of its prominent members. He met and corresponded with V. I. Lenin, was a delegate to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Comintern Congresses, and attended the plenary sessions of its Executive Committee, where he delivered reports and speeches. Varga was director of the Institute of World Economy and World Politics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1927 to 1947, a member of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and editor in chief of the journal Mirovoe khoziaistvo i mirovaia politika (World Economy and World Politics).

Varga was a major scholar in the field of the political economy of capitalism. His numerous works offer a creative development of Marxist-Leninist economic theory and a profound analysis of the laws of development of imperialism. He studied the economic and political contradictions of imperialism, new trends in the development of present-day state monopoly capitalism, economic cycles and crises, business conditions of the world capitalist economy, and the competition of the two world social systems; and he developed critical approaches to bourgeois and reformist ideologists. Varga’s works have been published in many countries of the world. In 1963 he received the Lenin Prize for distinguished contributions to the development of Marxist-Leninist science. He was awarded three Orders of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.