The book offers a political biography of Nikolai Alekseevich Voznesensky, a prominent economic leader in the late Stalinist period, featuring an analysis of the Soviet Union’s planned economy and its political-ideological context. Renowned for being the «economic dictator of Russia» during World War II, Voznesensky was a leading theorist and close collaborator of Stalin. Yet he remained unfamiliar among non-specialists, for he fell into disgrace and was executed in 1949, thus not surviving Stalinism. This biography is emblematic of the political, economic, and social dynamics of the Stalinist era in the USSR and provides insight into the evolution of the Soviet system up to Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, which marked the end of the planned economy.

Giovanni Cadioli teaches at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris and is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Padova.