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February 28, 1863

Roman Orzhentsky was the first Ukrainian mathematical economist. Born in Zhytomyr on February 28, 1863, he studied at the University of Odessa until 1887, worked with various institutions of the Odessa municipal government, or zemstvo, and then was sent to the Yaroslavl gubernia in Russia.

Orzhentsky returned to Ukraine in 1919, and was chosen to head the chair of theoretical economics at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and in 1921-1922 became the head of its socio-economic division.

According to the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, he subscribed to the "psychological school of marginal utility theory," defended the subjected theory of value and the feasibility of measuring and comparing consumer preferences. In the difficult inflationary conditions of the civil war, he studied the movement of market prices in Kyiv. A statistician, Orzhentsky developed a new method for measuring varied complex economic phenomena with the help of variables and probability.

The Zhytomyr-born economist was a consistent critic of Marxist economic theory, notably that of the labor theory of value. He emigrated to Poland in the face of the Bolshevik advance, and died in Warsaw, on May 24, 1923.

Source: "Orzhentsky, Roman," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, February 25, 1996, No. 8, Vol. LXIV

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