Yuri Maltsev, R.I.P.
January 28, 2023
My old friend Yuri Maltsev passed away on Thursday. As many LRC and Mises.org readers know, Yuri was part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika staff until he defected from the Soviet Union in 1989 and came to America. He earned a Ph.D. at Moscow State University during the Cold War and, lo and behold, became an Austrian School economist! I met Yuri soon after he arrived in the U.S. and asked him how he became familiar with the Austrian School. His answer was that part of his job for Gorbachev was to read and criticize the literature of the bourgeois capitalist exploiters. As such, he was given special permission to access that literature, some of which came with a long prison sentence to any ordinary Soviet citizen caught with it.
Yuri said that he read a contraband copy of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom in mimeograph form, and passed it on to someone else immediately after he finished it. Everything in the book was absolutely true about collectivism and government planning, he said. Years later, in 2009, right after the crash of 2008, Yuri and our friend Tom Woods appeared on the Glenn Beck television program to discuss The Road to Serfdom. After that discussion, the sales ranking of this 1943 book went to #1 on Amazon. I then put together a five-week online course on the book for the Mises Institute that attracted several hundred students from all over the world.
Having spent so much of his life in socialist hell, once he got a good-paying job in America Yuri reveled in consumerism. He would buy a $3,000 car, drive it for a while, then sell it back to the dealer he bought it from. He said he did that about thirty times. He also bought foreclosed real estate from HUD and rented or resold them, typically offering say, $5,000 for a house listed at say, $35-50,000 – and succeeding!
Yuri was associated with the Mises Institute for many years as a guest speaker at conferences and a lecturer at the annual Mises University. What an amazing time it was for me in the early days of Mises University to sit around at a place like Stanford University shortly after the worldwide collapse of socialism talking with such people as Murray Rothbard and Yuri Maltsev. He was always an extraordinarily popular speaker because of his wit and his unique knowledge of both Austrian economics and real-world experiences of having lived much of his life in the former Soviet Union. No one in the world was better able to explain in such vivid detail why Mises was right about socialism all along. If anything, Mises may have understated the barbarity of socialism which, in the Soviet case, was “all about mass murder,” as Yuri said.
When I first met Yuri I asked him what he thought the biggest difference was between life in the Soviet Union and life in America. He said that in the Soviet Union no one believed anything the government said, but Americans believe everything the government says. The response of at least 90 percent of Americans to covid totalitarianism is the most recent example of this truism.