Rustem Nureev Passes Away

Rustem Nureev, Tenured Professor who had a long association with HSE University, has passed away. He was one of the university’s first professors and a member of the first Academic Council. Prof. Nureev’s colleagues share their memories of him.

‘It Is a Bitter and Irreparable Loss’

Svetlana Avdasheva, Head of the Department of Applied Economics

The first Head of the Department of Economic Theory at the HSE Faculty of Economics has died. It is a bitter and irreparable loss.

He was an exemplary lecturer in political economy for first-year students. His lectures were perfectly calibrated, logical, and wonderfully timed. Students had to get involved in discussing the subject, despite the fact that there were about two hundred of us. Sitting at the front of the class in his lectures was both desirable and scary—you could see and hear better and there were fewer disruptions, but you were also more likely to be the first person to be asked a question (and almost certainly answer incorrectly). Those sunny September and October days with hundreds of students in the classroom of the second humanitarian building of Moscow State University and Nureev’s lectures are among my top ten best memories.

Like so many economists of that time, Prof. Nureev’s own research was emphatically academic and devoted to the organisation of the economy in pre-capitalist formations (especially in the period that was then called the ‘primitive communal system’). Out of our narrow-mindedness, we teased him for this choice. Only after many, many years did we realise that the study of pre-capitalist formations is more than just an opportunity to get away from inevitable and often unpleasant relations with ideology and current politics in the social sciences. Descriptions and explanations of the organisation of economies in the period before modern states are very useful for understanding our modern life. Pre-capitalist formations are about the choice of institutions. It is no coincidence that Elinor Ostrom received the Nobel Prize for her research, which was very similar in content if not in form or theoretical framework.

Rustem Nureev was my first supervisor at HSE University. His first project was the preparation of guidelines for a course on microeconomics. These lectures were later included in a textbook on microeconomics. However, the course was quickly discontinued at HSE University. This was not so much because it contained errors or inaccuracies in regard to microeconomics (I believe there were very few of those), but because Rustem Nureyev’s lectures on any subject were always very content rich.

If one were to try and formulate his motto as a professor, it would be: ‘Do not limit yourself to a framework. Look for parallels in our humanitarian knowledge. Quote history, literature and use all our humanitarian baggage.’ But this is precisely what we lack now. It may be easier to teach diagrams and models, but they are only diagrams and models. Even the seemingly comical illustrations of the first welfare theorem using characters from The Adventures of Buratino are good because readers, together with Rustem Nureev, were be able to recall the works of both Alexey Tolstoy and Carlo Collodi, not just the possibilities of market exchange. By the way, without prejudice to microeconomics: as far as I remember, after his lectures at ICEF, students were consistently the best group of attendees in foreign programmes at the London School of Economics.

The breadth of Rustem Nureyev's interests as a teacher was enviable. Switching to microeconomics and macroeconomics after political economy? No problem! And without turning micro- and macroeconomics into political economy. Institutional economics? Of course! After all, the entirety of economic theory is about institutions. Development economics? Sure! After all, institutions are a necessary condition for development, as Acemoglu and Robinson will confirm. Rustem Nureev's extensive academic interests allowed the employees of the department he headed to take such different positions in the system of training economists.

He was a prolific academic supervisor. None of us has even come close to him in terms of the number of doctoral students who successfully defended their works under his supervision. At the same time, it might seem strange to many that Rustem Nureev allowed graduate students to choose their topics completely independently. Even if I do not know all the nuances of the literature on this topic, what’s the problem? Am I not a professor? We will deal with any issue—and isn’t it wonderful? Dozens of people are sincerely grateful to him for being absolutely unbiased towards doctoral students of other supervisors.

He was one of the first tenured professors at HSE University—probably among the first ten. He was very serious about the role of the Board of Tenured Professors.

He was also an impeccably academic person. Yes, he and I could and did lose as advisers and experts to the government. We were unable to give really valuable and expensive advice to Russian companies. We have not taken places of honour in any international associations of economists. But the atmosphere of academic life, even if it cannot be measured and digitised, is the most precious thing a university has. Part of that is gone with Rustem Nureev.

I’ve never fallen out of the habit of calling him by his first name and patronymic.

‘He Always Had a Cheerful and Warm Soul’

Dmitry Koptyubenko, Director for Online Media

Prof. Nureev was a huge event in my life.

He was my academic advisor. I took my term papers and defended graduation papers with him. I prepared and defended my dissertation at HSE University with him. He let me photocopy some books that were nowhere to be found in the early 2000s. With his tips, I wrote a book that was even accepted by a good publisher, for which I was always terribly grateful to him. He was also very fond of joking, ending his quips with the phrase ‘That’s a joke, of course,’ and winking conspiratorially.

He always had a cheerful and warm soul. Your memory retains very few people who have left a mark on your biography and about whom you only remember good things. Prof. Nureev is one of those few.

‘All the Earth Was His Inheritance’

Vladimir Avtonomov, Tenured and Distinguished Professor of HSE University

I missed the only opportunity in my life to learn directly from Rustem Nureev. In the tenth grade of the Economics and Mathematics School at Moscow State University, we had to choose special courses. Rustem, with an ominous laugh, informed us that in his special course ‘The Dialectics of Marx’s Capital’, he was going to give us a metaphysical concept of dialectics. The abyss of wisdom scared me away, and I chose Interindustry Models instead.

Rustem was a man of great erudition that he enjoyed sharing with everyone. Our joint travels stand out especially vividly in my memory: Ivolginsky Datsan in Buryatia, the Cottage Palace in Peterhof, the Slovenian city of Piran, Kozelsk and Optina Pustyn, and many, many other wonderful places. Rustem warmly enveloped his fellow travellers in his knowledge of history and art, and if there was an opportunity for him to learn something, he never missed it. Once we were waiting for a trip on a steamboat in the Dutch city of Haarlem. There were 15 minutes left, and Rustem rushed to the museum located on the other side of the canal. Exactly 15 minutes later he ran out of the museum and joined us. According to him, he found a lot of interesting things. No surprise there!

Basically, ‘all the earth was his inheritance’, and he was willing to share it with everyone in his own way, which we loved very much.

April 12, 2023

In memoriam