REMEMBERING EUGEN VARGA

(1879-1964)

André Mommen

CEPS
Maarssen

August 2010

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He went out into the dusk. The last
Ray of the sun glowed in the clouds,
Like a funeral torch lighting his path.

Yakov Polonskiy

Eugen Varga died of a stomach cancer on 7 October 1964 in a Moscow hospital. His official

obituary in Pravda (9 October 1964) and in Izvestya (10 October 1964) stated that

Yevgeny Samuilovich Varga was an outstanding representative of Marxist-Leninist

economic thought, a veteran of the international labour movement and Lenin Prize (1963)

winner. He received three Orders of Lenin (1944, 1953 and 1959), the order of the Red

Banner of Labour (1954) and medals. His works were characterised by “party spirit”

(partinost) and intolerance toward any manifestations of dogmatism, revisionism,

vulgarisation and pedantry imposed on science in the years of the cult of the individual. This

obituary was signed by N. S. Khrushchev, A. I. Mikoyan, B. N. Ponomarev, M. V. Keldysh,

V. A. Kirillin, M. D. Millionshchikov, P. N. Fedoseyev, A. A. Arzumanyan, P. N. Pospelov,

Ye. M. Zhukov, S. G. Strumilin, K. V. Ostrovityanov, V. S. Nemchinov, N. P. Federenko, V.

N. Starovsky, N. N. Inozemtsev, L. A. Leontiev, M. A. Rubinshtein, I. M. Lemin and others.

By 1964, the year of his death, Varga had thus become an icon of Marxist-Leninism. His

books and articles were translated in many languages. His name was listed in encyclopaedias.

He was a member of the Presidium of the Society for the Dissemination of Political and

Scientific Knowledge as well. In several socialist countries he was celebrated as an older

Marxist with an outstanding career.

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In his native Hungary, the Academy of Sciences awarded him in 1955 with a Ph.D. honoris

causa. In the GDR, Jürgen Kuczynski (Mária Varga Archive, Moscow. Kuczynski’s to

Varga, 31 October 1959) rumoured about the existence of a “Varga School” of economic

thought in Moscow. When the Humboldt University in Berlin (GDR) celebrated its 150th

anniversary on 12 November 1960, Varga obtained at the behest of Kuczynski a Ph.D.

honoris causa for his ‘exceptional merits’ as a theoretician of state-monopoly capitalism

(Party Archives, Budapest, PIL, 783.f.13).

As a member of the Academy of Sciences, could be placed on the level of a minister of the

government of the USSR. As an academician he should have received a salary of 5,000

roubles a month in 1949 (Moore 1954: 125). In 1954, he obtained a spacious apartment at the

Leninskiy Prospekt 11 (formerly known as Kalushkaya Ulitsa) in Moscow. Several honorific

functions should be added to these material advantages. Medical specialists of the Kremlin

treated his family. In 1954, he was awarded the Stalin Prize. In 1954 and in 1959, he received

the Order of Lenin. In 1963, he was awarded the Lenin Prize for his scientific treatment of

the problems of modern capitalism. After his death, a commemorative plaque was apposed at

the apartment bloc at the Leninskiy Prospekt.

On 19 October 1964, a week after Varga’s death, the Soviet Academy of Sciences organized

a meeting in the building of the Academy in Moscow. In 1969, Varga’s 90 th birthday was

commemorated with some academic pomp and circumstances (Mirovaya ekonomika i

mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya 1969/11: 14-20; 1970/1: 123-31). In Pravda of 5

November 1969, IMEMO director N. N. Inozemtsev published a long article in which he

praised ‘teacher-internationalist’ Varga. In 1979, Varga’s centenary was a good reason for

publishing in three volumes selected chapters of Varga´s most important writings. That year

commemorative sessions were organised at the behest of academic authorities. The Academy

of Sciences of the USSR (Tvorcheskoe 1981), the University of Leipzig (Weber 1980),

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the Institut für Internationale Politik und Wirtschaft (IPW) (‘Zum 100. 1979) and the

Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Szigeti and Solt 1979: 1380-90; Népszabadság, 6

November 1979) commemorated Varga’s centenary.

Though Varga had been a high-ranking functionary during the Republic of Councils of 1919,

no statue was erected at his honour after 1945 in Budapest. The Karl Marx University in

Budapest named a dormitorium after him. A technical school at the Vörösmarty Utca in

Budapest received his name as well. A square in the XXII district (his birthplace) of

Budapest was named after him, but after the fall of Communism it was renamed Városház

Tér. A commemorative plaque is still embellishing the entrance hall of the school for girls at

Vas Utca where Varga was teaching in the 1910s. Another commemorative plaque was

apposed at his birthplace in Nagytétény. Today, the plaque has disappeared.

At the end of Varga’s life, economists, statisticians and mathematicians rejecting rigid

planning were already occupying academic strongholds. New institutes of the Soviet

Academy of Sciences were founded. At the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, A. I.

Mikoyan complained that modern capitalism was not closely enough studied. He criticized

the fact that Varga’s Institute of World economy and World Politics had been closed in 1947.

In April 1956, the government established a new institute of Western studies under the name

of IMEMO (Lebedeva 2004). Anastas Mikoyan's brother-in-law, A. A. Arzumanyan became

its first director (in 1966 he was replaced by N. N. Inosemtsev).

The international media paid sometimes attention to Varga’s economic forecasts. When he

predicted a new economic slump in Pravda (28 January 1954), The New York Times (9

February 1954) reacted. His article in Kommunist (1957/10: 100-12) on America’s alleged

economic decay earned him a publication in Fortune (July 1957: 119, 218-22, 224, 227-8).

Der aktuelle Osten published by the Volksbund für Frienden und Freiheit in Bonn made

a report (‘Ein Professor zwischen zwei Welten’ 1957) on him.

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Western scholars sometimes commented negatively on Varga’s scientific work. Evsey D.

Domar blamed Varga for not giving a precise analysis of the problem of economic growth

(Domar 1950: 132-51) and for producing general statements coming close to the

underconsumption theory. In the 1960s, French Communist Paul Boccara (1966) criticized

Varga’s ‘unilaterally insisting on the negative aspects of the rotten process and by mixing up

positivism with dogmatism’. Eric Hobsbawn (2007: 74) opined that Varga had excluded any

return to peaceful capitalism as well. Henryk Grossmann argued that Varga described

appearances without making any ‘attempt to build these into Marx’ overall system’

(Grossmann 1992: 180). Judging from Ernesto Galli Della Loggia (1979), Varga’s

contribution to Marxist theory would have been rather insignificant. Maurice Andreu (2003)

thought that Varga had been working in the tradition of the Second International (Kautsky,

Hilferding, Bauer). According to Richard Day, Varga avoided any theoretical innovations

when fitting recent developments into the established Marxist categories (Day 1981: 57-8).

According to Elmar Altvater (1969: xiii) one can reconstruct the ‘Stalinisation process’ by

counting the quantity of Stalin quotes and denunciations contained in Varga’s publications.

Economic historian Jürgen Kuczynski was an enthusiastic adept of Varga. He called Varga

‘the most outstanding Marxist economist of the century’ and ‘my teacher’ (Kuczynski 1992:

31; 1987: 114). He admired Varga because of the latter’s open-mindedness ‘for new

developments in the world, vigorous in his thinking and courageous in his utterances’

(Kuczynski 1992: 51). However, notwithstanding Kuczynski’s support, Varga’s popularity in

the GDR was not accompanied by a thoroughgoing study of his works. Petra Gansauge

(1989) of the Karl Marx University in Leipzig was the first, but also the last scholar in the

GDR having studied Varga’s monopoly theory. Gerhard Duda’s (1994) Ph.D. on the history

of Varga’s Institute of World Economy and World Politics was published five years after the

fall of the Wall.

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Varga’s political and scientific enemies used crude words when commenting on his works.

Lucien Laurat (1935: 12) saw him as a ‘vulgar demagogue’ falsifying statistics. Karl Korsch

(1972: 185) called Varga expressis verbis a ‘vulgar economist’. According to Arturo

Spriano, the Stalinists had needed this ‘emblematic figure’ and ‘scapegoat’ (Spriano 1985:

281) in one person to exercise full control on the Communist world movement. Bukharin had

little esteem for Varga’s scientific work and person. Trotsky called him with Béla Kun and

John Pepper (Pogány) ‘the worst elements in the Comintern leadership’ for ‘having made

many mistakes during the short period of time of the Councils’ Republic in Hungary. Kun

was ‘an adventurer’, Pogány was ‘the prototype of a political client’, who ‘after the

victorious revolution was sitting like a fly on the sugar’, and Varga was the ‘polished type of

a scientific Polonius at the service of any leadership of the Comintern’, an opportunist

missing a ‘revolutionary will’ (Trotsky Archives, Houghton Library, Harvard, T 3129, p. 5).

Karl Volk [alias Ypsilon] identified Varga as ‘the weather prophet of the Comintern’ who

was ‘always ready to prove theoretically, that the clouds in the sky look like a camel’s back,

but if you prefer they resemble a fish’ (Ypsilon 1947: 159). Max Faragó (1921: 135) saw in

Varga ‘an author of several compilations with little scientific value’. Former Red Professor

Aleksandr Uralov (A. Avtorkhanov) (1953: 93) argued that Varga combined opportunism

with a typical form of German pedantry and the suppleness of an Indian fakir. László Tikos

depicted Varga as a ‘reluctant conformist’ being not ‘at ease with his comrades’ (Tikos

1965c: 113-31). Ruth Fischer remembered him as ‘an angry little man, a living data base’

belonging to the Comintern’s Right, but always changing his mind (1949: 47).

In reality, Varga was a moralist. Often, moralists use to be hypocrites as well. He publicly

denounced depravation and moral decay in the capitalist world. Especially the ‘depraved’

character of the American detective novel with its ‘gangsters, murderers and speculators on a

grand scale are more and more often becoming the heroes of the literature, the cinema and

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the theatre of the bourgeoisie countries’ (Varga 1962a: 131), displeased him. Varga: ‘… a

200-page detective novel, packed with sordid incidents and low passions which poison the

minds of the youth and incite them to crime, sells in the United States for 25 cents. Such

corrupting literature is not published in our country at all’ (New Times 1956-26: 7). Ruth

von Mayenburg (1978: 129) remembered Varga as a ‘fervent reader of detectives’. He kept

that preference for ‘moral depraved’ books until the end of his life. When being in a Moscow

hospital in June 1957, Varga asked Jürgen Kuczynski for detective novels (Archives Berlin-

Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Varga’s letter of 10 July 1957, Kuczynski

140). It appears that Kuczynski had been his regular provider of detectives (Archives

Berlin/Brandenburgische Akademie, Varga’s letter of 6 June 1961). But he was not the only

one. When staying in hospital in the beginning of 1961, Hungarian party leader János Kádár

sent Varga 20 detective stories by diplomatic courier (Huszár 2002: 178; PIL, S. Varga to

Kádár, 11 February 1961, and Kádár to S. Varga, 17 February 1961, f. 274, 10-122.).

In the late 1960s, a document known as ‘Varga’s Testament’ circulated as a samizdat in

Moscow. This paper (‘Rossiyskiy put perekhoda k socializmu i ego rezultaty’) had made its

first appearance in 1967 in Yuri Galanskov’s samizdat publication Feniks-66 circulating

among local ‘dissidents’. In 1970, the same text was published in France as Le Testament

de Varga with a foreword written by Roger Garaudy. Some pages of it were published in

January-February in New Left Review (1970 59). An abstract was simultaneously

published in May 1970 in Paris Politique Aujourd’hui and in Vienna in the Wiener

Tagebuch. This document transmitted the message that the working class was no longer

ruling the Soviet Union, that democracy was absent and that the bureaucracy had taken over

all power because of the backward economic level of Soviet society inherited from the

Tsarist period. This forged article would cause serious problems to the Varga family in

Moscow. Sári Varga and her daughter Mária Varga signed a letter in the Literaturnaya

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Gazeta (26 August 1970) in which they protested against this grove concoction and V. Ya.

Aboltin, S. A. Dalin, V. I. Kaplan, A. A. Manukyan, E. A. Gromov, Ya. A. Pevzner and V.

A. Cheprakov denounced it as a falsification. G. G. Pospelov revealed in a letter to

Russkaya mysl that his father, a certain G. Pospelov, was the real author of the forged

samizdat. (Russkaya mysl, 6-12 January 1994).

Unpublished Varga memoirs existed nonetheless. At the end of his life, Varga dictated his

memoirs to his former secretary Rózsi Lóránd, but he died before finishing his manuscript. In

Varga’s will was stipulated that 25 years after his death his memoirs could be published.

They were however first published in Hungarian translation in the journal Világosság

(1988: 749-765). Following the suggestion of Mikhael Gefter, a highly esteemed historian,

the manuscript was translated into Russian and excerpts of it were published in Polis

(1990/2, 3: 175-83 and 148-64). The original German text was later published in Gerhard

Duda’s book on the history of Varga’s institute (Duda 1995: 359-447). Rózsi Lóránd, who

had come back to Moscow only for that task of noting and typing Varga’s memoirs, was one

of the latter’s confidents. She had been working for him as a secretary before returning to

Budapest in 1947. Her husband Ferenc Csillag (a typographer having participated in the

Hungarian revolution of 1919) was murdered during Stalin’s Great Purge. Her son was killed

by the mob during the 1956 upheavals in Budapest.

We are missing now the full version of Varga’s memoirs. That is a pity. Soviet and

Comintern functionaries seldom published their memoirs or collections of private papers.

The CIA smuggled Khrushev’s “tapes” to the West. Some transcripts were published by

Strobe Talbott: Nikita S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, Boston: Little, Brown,

1970. In 1990 followed Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, edited by

Jerrold L. Schecter and Vyacheslav Luchkov, Boston: Little, Brown. In 1999, 4 volumes of

Khrushchev’s memoirs were published in Moscow, N. S. Khrushchev: Vospominaniya-

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vremya, lyudi, vlast, Moscow: Moskovskie novosti. Memoirs of other members of

Stalin’s Politburo surfaced after the fall of Communism. Anastas Mikoyan, Tak bylo.

Razmyshleniya, Moscow: Vagrius, 1999, and Lazar Kaganovich: Pamyatnye

zapiski. Rabochego kommunista-bolshevika, profsoyuznogo, partiynogo i

Sovetcko-Gosudartctvennogo rabotnika, Moscow: Vagrius, 2003. Of course,

Lavrenti Beria had no time to compose his memoirs before he was shot, but his son Sergo,

who, by the way, married Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, invented them. Sergo Beriya, Moy

otets Beriya. B koridorakh stalinkskoy vlasti, Moscow: “Olma-Press”, 2002.

Strange, but true, this book is a translation of Sergo Beria, Mon père. Au cœur du

pouvoir stalinien, Paris: Plan/Critérion 1999. At the end of his life, Molotov gave a long

interview: Vyacheslav Molotov, Molotov Remembers: Conversations with Feliks

Chuev (ed. Albert Resis), Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993.

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Day, R. B. (1981) The ‘Crisis’ and the ‘Crash’. Soviet Studies of the West (1917-1939),

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