POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SPACE: THE PROBLEM OF RENT AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE USSR’S ECONOMIC THOUGHT IN THE 1930–1950s

The article analyzes the development of the rent theory in the Soviet Union in the 1930–1950s which would later become a conceptual basis for the environmental economics in the USSR. Its primary goal is to answer the question of why, after heated debates of the NEP era, the issue of rent completely disappeared from the academic discourse for almost fifteen years. The answer I offer is based on the analysis of the end of history ideologeme — the utopian idea that the development of planning by itself solves all economic and social problems in the country, including all forms of rent. The return of the rent problem back in the economic discourse in the late Stalin period should be understood in the context of the emergent political economy of socialism, a discipline aimed at the overcoming the utopian and antiscientific nature of the end of history ideology. This research also analyzes in a great detail the key article for the development of the rent theory in that period — I. D. Laptev’s “The collective farms’ revenue and differential rent” (1944). The result of the work is the conclusion that the reemergence of the rent theory in the Soviet economic discourse of the Stalin period was accompanied by its normalization — whereas in the 1920s, rent was understood as a heritage of capitalism violating such a key principle of socialism as the distribution according to labor, for I. D. Laptev, it was nothing but a “gift of nature”.