Исаа́к Ильи́ч Ру́бин (Russian economist) Add a review

Isaak Illich Rubin (Russian: Исаак Ильич Рубин; 12 June 1886 – 27 November 1937) was a Soviet lawyer, economist and scholar of Marx's work. His most important published work was Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (first edition, 1923).

His scholarly works and textbooks and his popular lectures, e.g., at the Institute of Red Professors, were an important influence on the Soviet interpretation of Karl Marx throughout the twenties; but he was not himself a Bolshevik and was frequently jailed, then banished to Soviet Central Asia, then executed in 1937 during the Great Purge.

Though Rubin published many works in the 1920s, and his reading of Marx had produced an extensive Russian literature, by the late 1930s his work and memory had been completely expunged within the Soviet Union. Rubin was also unknown in the West until the appearance of Roman Rosdolsky's major 1968 study of Marx's Grundrisse, "The Making of Marx's Capital"; Rosdolsky was a witness to the period and in the book made numerous references to the "Rubin school" of the twenties. Soon a rare surviving copy of Rubin's principal work, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, was found and an English translation appeared. Since that time much more material has emerged.

As a result, from the 1970s onward Rubin once again became a major point of reference in scholarly disputes about Marx's theory of value.

He was also rehabilitated by the Soviet Union; as the Russian researchers Lyudmila Vasina and Y. G. Rokityansky state "In the years 1989–91 I. I. Rubin was unconditionally rehabilitated with respect to all the trials of the 1920s and 1930s."(p. 836)