Papers of Alexander Gerschenkron

Alexander Gerschenkron (1904-1978) was the Walter S. Barker Professor of Economics at Harvard. Gerschenkron was born in Odessa, Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire). He left Odessa in 1920 and moved to Vienna, Austria, where he attended the University of Vienna, graduating in 1928. In 1938, Gerschenkron began working as a research assistant in Vienna for American economics professor Charles Gulick (University of California Berkeley), helping Gulick to write his book, Austria from Habsburg to Hitler. Gerschenkron fled Vienna following the German invasion of Austria in 1938, first arriving in England and soon moving to California at the invitation of Gulick, who offered him a research assistant position at Berkeley. Around 1943, just before his first book, Bread and Democracy in Germany was published, Gerschenkron was promoted to lecturer at Berkeley and began to teach courses in economic history and international trade. In 1944, he accepted a job as a European economic analyst at the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C. In 1948, he joined the faculty of the Harvard economics department, receiving a full professorship in 1951 and retiring in 1975. He taught Economics 233: The Economic History of Europe.

After publishing a research paper titled “Economic Relations with the USSR” in 1945 while working for the Federal Reserve, Gerschenkron became known as an expert in Soviet economics. In the 1950s, during his early years at Harvard, Gerschenkron focused his research on Soviet industrial production. His findings led to what is now called the “Gerschenkron effect.” He also wrote about “economic backwardness,” a linear theory of economic development. Gerschenkron also spoke several languages - including Russian, German, English, Latin, Swedish, and Bulgarian - and translated works.