«Lieutenant Kizhe» of Russian Economics, or a Word in Defense of Its Empirical Historiography

Abstract

The article addresses such a practice of historiography of economic science that rarely attracts research attention as establishing the probable authorship of a text using the example of the article «Prerequisites of Real Economic Policy», published in two issues of the famous magazine «The Economist» in 1922. For more than a century, the pseudonym P. Chubutsky, with whom this work was signed, has been considered and perceived as the name and surname of a real-life representative of domestic economic science. Assuming the famous Russian publicist and economist-researcher Peter Pavlovich Maslov as the probable author of the publication and presenting arguments justifying the choice made, the author of this article doesn’t consider the attribution of the text as an end in itself. Placing the problem of establishing authorship in the broad context of the historiography of economic science, the author seeks to clarify the reasons why the famous author of the early 20th century turned into the «Lieutenant Kizhe» of domestic economic science, the history of economic thought made no attempts to bring the owner of the pseudonym to the forefront of science, and the discipline lost its empirical and historical orientation, having the word «his¬tory» in its title.