Stalin's think tank: The Varga Institute and the making of the Stalinist idea of world economy and politics, 1927--1953

This is a study of the history of the Institute of World Economy and World Politics (the Varga Institute). Headed by Eugene Varga, a Hungarian-born economist, the Institute served as a key foreign policy think tank for the dictator for over two decades beginning in the late 1920s.;My dissertation takes two distinct approaches to the Institute's history. First, it conducts a discursive analysis of the body of its major scholarly productions, which is comprised of secret policy papers for Stalin and other research publications. The Institute's works, mostly about economic crises in the capitalist world, provided the General Secretary with the discursive field in which he understood international affairs and conceived his foreign policy. Second, taking the Varga Institute as a case study, I empirically explore the political and institutional history of the Stalinist Party and academia. By presenting inside stories surrounding the Institute based on its own archival files and the Party's Central Committee records, I revisit critical historiographical questions, such as the role of academicians in policymaking, the practices of academic institutes and the relationship between academia and the Party in Stalin's Russia.;After a humble start, by the early 1930s the Institute had become the dominant institute on the world economy in the Soviet Union. Such impressive growth was directly due to the sponsorship of Stalin who needed an in-depth analysis of the capitalist economy in the post-Great Depression period. Under Stalin's protection, the Institute survived the political terrors in the late 1930s and the early 1940s. Based on the close relationship with Stalin, the Varga group did not see the Party as "them" as opposed to "us." Rather, the Party was their milieu.;To get to an understanding of contemporary world economy and its crisis, the Institute actively embraced W. E. Mitchell's business cycle study, along with the Marxist crisis theories, and produced a highly historical, concrete and comparative economic discourse set, which raised the possibility of making highly situational ideas and strategies specific to certain conditions in the arena of international politics. The Varga group's discourse pushed Stalin to adopt Realpolitik foreign policy.