Vladimir Bazarov
"[1] Also in this period Bazarov joined with his old Tula comrades Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov and Alexander Bogdanov in retranslating and publishing a new Russian-language edition of the three volumes of Capital by Karl Marx.
[6] Bazarov also became interested in philosophy during the first decade of the 20th century, coming to reject Marx's formulaic dialectical materialism in favor of the use of the scientific method to observe and theorize about human behavior, as espoused by the Austrian Ernst Mach and the German-Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius.
[6] The Bolshevik supporters of the "empirical-criticism" of Mach and Avenarius, including Bazarov, Bogdanov, and Nikolai Valentinov, were soon the target of a bitter polemic by Lenin published in 1909, Materialism and Empirio-criticism.
[6] In 1919 he published Na puti k sotsializmu (Khar'kov, 1919), for which he was attacked by Bukharin, who viewed him and Bogdanov as being part of a combined opposition espousing a theory of a "bureaucratic degeneration (the technico-intellectual bureaucracy, the 'organizing' caste)".
In 1922, Bazarov joined the staff of the State Planning Commission, where he met Vladimir Groman, with whom he would work intimately for the next half decade.
[10] Together with Groman, Bazarov was influential in developing the idea that a diminishing rate of growth was an earmark of economies such as that of the Soviet Union which were in the process of recovery.
In response to a draft Five-Year Plan prepared by the Supreme Council of National Economy (VSNKh) which posited industrial growth of 135% over the five economic years 1927/28 to 1932/33, Bazarov deemed the long-term possibilities "fascinating" and "enchanting.
"[16] Such a pace was soon dismissed as inadequate by those holding more extreme views, however, and Bazarov was sharply criticized for pessimism in underestimating "the advantages inherent in the Soviet system.
"[17] Ultimately, a growth of 179% over the five-year period was approved by Soviet planning authorities, and Bazarov, Groman, and others holding similar views favoring a less drastic rate of capital accumulation were shunted aside.
Groman gave public testimony that he and Bazarov headed a counterrevolutionary group in Gosplan, purportedly organized in 1923, which attempted at "influencing the economic policy of the Soviet authorities so as to hold the position of 1923-25.
"Putting into the control figures and into the surveys of current business planning ideas and deliberately distorted appraisals antagonistic to the general Party line (lowering the rates of expansion of socialist construction, distorting the class approach, exaggerating the difficulties), stressing the signs of an impending catastrophe (Groman) or, what is close to this, assigning a negligible chance of success to the Party line directed toward the socialist attack (Bazarov, Gukhman)..."[22]Although excluded from the public trial which besmirched him, Bazarov was tried in secret and sentenced to a term of prison for his alleged wrecking activities.
[23] A December 1931 letter from the USSR published in the Menshevik journal Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (Socialist Herald) reported that Bazarov was being held at that time in a political "isolator" at Yaroslavl.
