Because. like others, I fall from time to time behind in reading your list, I did not notice Professor Shlapentokh's piece about the passing of Professor Katsenelinboigen until this weekend. but would like to share some personal comments on that remarkable man which I hope you can share with the list.

I first personally met Professor Katsenelinboigen in Carlisle, PA when I was teaching at Dickinson College for two years from 1979 to 1981. Later I also caught up with him here in Ann Arbor when he passed through on his way to see Professor Shlapentokh whom he, rightly, highly regarded.

Along with Igor Birman, Katsenelinboigen convinced me that the state of the Soviet economy was quite dire which was a factor in the analysis I made in our 1980 Afghanistan statement when I suggested that a Soviet defeat in Afghanistan was not only possible but also suggested could lead to the collapse of the Soviet system. At the time I first encountered Katsenelinboigen, it astonished me a great deal to hearing him say that he thought, given the Soviet circumstances, that Reagan would be the right man for the times in the American presidency. While I did vote for Reagan the first time, I was not as sanguine about his election as was Katsenelinboigen then. But in retrospect, I think that he was quite prescient on this.

In a brief conversation here in Ann Arbor, Katsenelinboigen made the statement that it was Leonid Kantorovich who taught him that Marx was wrong in his microeconomics. He then added that Kantorovich was a very conservative man when it came to these matters by which I understood that Katsenelinboigen was speaking about the insights he got from the linear programing that Kantorovich received his Nobel prize for. When I read Katsenelinboigen's excellent book "Soviet Union", it confirmed my understanding of that brief comment.

If I had to describe Katsenelinboigen in an American context, I would describe him as a Russian or, if you will, Soviet Kenneth Boulding. Both men were not only very bright, but also men with very imaginative minds from which one could learn a great deal from even a short encounter. In his macroeconomics, like Boulding, Katsenelinboigen was very much a Keynesian. He had a great deal of admiration for what he called the Cambridge school of economics which included such giants as Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes whom Boulding also greatly admired.

At the time I sent the 1921-22 essay by Boris Brutzkus on the socialist economy to to the Soviet Union to Gorbachev and a number of people which resulted in the essay being republished in Novy Mir in 1991, I suggested in my unanswered letter to Gorbachev that he should consult a number of economists in thinking about a viable economic reform including Igor Birman and Aaron Katsenelinboigen. In that context, it is interesting to note that both men independently volunteered to me that they found our Soviet economic specialists reluctant to ask them questions about the Soviet economic system. I always have felt that we payed a high price for this in our inability to respond in the economic area effectively to the opportunities open up for both of us as a result of the collapse of the Soviet system.